THE THREE SECTORS OF THE ECONOMY

Exercise 1

Match the following questions and answers:

1. What do we mean by the primary sector of the economy?

2. What happens to the food extracted in the primary sector?
3. So what’s the secondary sector?
4. So people in the secondary sector make things?
5. And the tertiary sector?
6. Why is the number of people working in the primary sector regularly declining?
7. And why is the secondary sector getting smaller in many of these countries?
8. But not tertiary services?

a. Because agricultural methods are always becoming more efficient. Western Europe and
the USA already produce too much food with only 3%of the population working on the
land.
b. Because much manufacturing can be carried out more cheaply in low-wage economies,
for example in East and South-East Asian countries like China, Hong Kong, Taiwan,
South Korea, Malaya and Vietnam.
c. Agriculture and the extraction of raw materials from the earth (coal-mining, drilling for
oil) or the sea (fishing).
d. It includes the commercial services that enable industry to produce and distribute goods
to their final consumers (trade, banking, insurance, warehousing, transport,
communications, advertising, and so on), as well as activities like education, health care
and tourism.
e. It involves the transformation of raw materials into finished products.
f. Not if the activities require a lot of training, education, know-how and technology.
g. Only some of them. Manufacturing companies also employ finance and marketing
managers, administrative staff, maintenance staff, and so on.
h. Some of it, such as fresh fruit or fish, is consumed almost immediately after extraction;
the rest serves as raw material for the secondary sector.
1) C
2) H
3) E
4) F
5) D
6) A
7) B
8) G
Exercise 2

Add verbs in the correct form to the following sentences.

1. Raw materials are brought from the ground and the either semi-finished, or incorporated
into finished goods.
2. Before finished goods are sold, they are often have to be ………….., …………….,
……………, etc. ( I don’t know words to fill in the blank)