Insight Plus - Part 6 – Oil | Текст песни

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Группа Learning English. Продолжение транскрипта:
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Jackie: Oil makes our world go round…they call it black gold. It fuels our cars,
runs our industries, it makes our countries work. So when oil prices go
up, or when supplies are scarce, oil can cause a global crisis.
Oil is the topic of this second chance to hear Insight Plus - your guide to
the language you hear every day in the news, first broadcast in 2001.
Here’s Lyse Doucet.
Lyse: In the last few months of the year 2000, oil was in the headlines again.
Protests swept across Europe as truck drivers, farmers, and thousands
of other people demonstrated against high oil prices. It was an
unprecedented show of strength across the region – a call for
governments to reduce high taxes on oil to help bring the prices down.
But governments argued the oil producers or OPEC was to blame.
We’ll hear more about OPEC in a moment. Let's listen to a typical news
report from that time. This one is from Andrew Walker, BBC World
Service Economics correspondent.
Clip
Four times already this year OPEC has agreed to boost output. But the price of crude
remains stubbornly high - three times the level of less than two years ago. There are
signs that energy costs have added to inflation in oil importing countries. Some
economists, albeit a minority, are concerned about the historical parallels. In the past
when oil prices have risen so sharply, recessions have followed in many oil consuming
nations. Nonetheless at this meeting it is not likely that OPEC will increase production
again. Its most recent boost came at the beginning of November. The organisation
prefers to wait and give output changes some time to affect prices. In any event, most
analysts think that the high price of crude is not caused by insufficient production. The
problem is that stocks of oil products, notably heating oil are low.
Lyse: The oil world divides into consuming and producing countries.
Consumer nations don’t have any oil fields to produce their own oil.
They often import crude oil, oil that is not refined. It’s sold by the
barrel.
High oil prices can have a devastating impact on the economy of a
consuming nation. If prices remain high for a long period, it affects
prices of goods across the economy. A general rise in prices is called
inflation and, as the last report pointed out, some economies can even
go into recession – that’s a long period of falling economic activity.
So in the year 2000, when prices stayed above thirty dollars a barrel, oil
producing countries came under huge pressure to boost output - to
increase production - to bring prices down. It was this need to have
some control over worldwide output and prices that led many oil
producing nations to establish an organisation or cartel in 1960 called
OPEC - the Organisation of Petroleum Exporting Countries.
OPEC now brings together 11 governments from around the world
including major Arab producers such as Saudi Arabia and Libya,
African states like Nigeria and Algeria, producers in South America
such as Venezuela, and from Asia, Indonesia.
OPEC tries to coordinate policies on how much is produced in each
country. This is to ensure a certain supply of oil worldwide, as well as
satisfactory prices for OPEC producers, and sufficient profits for
companies as well as countries which invest in the oil industry. But
some major producers such as Mexico, Russia, Norway and Oman
decided not to join this collective effort to coordinate production and
prices. That affects OPEC’s power to control the oil market.
Lyse: Almost everything we use in our daily lives has been produced in
factories that depend on some kind of fuel – everything from the glasses
we drink from, to the paper we write on.
...