unit 12 Adam Smith

Pre-test
9. With hard currency acting as a check to
spending, Smith wanted the government to follow free-market principles by keeping taxes low and allowing free trade across borders by eliminating tariffs ____________. man is rich or poor is to examine the amount of ____________ he can afford labour to purchase.
Background Information
Mercantilism
The Scottish Enlightenment
Background Information
Mercantilism is an economic theory that holds the prosperity of a state as dependent upon its supply of capital, that the global volume of international trade is "unchangeable," and that one party may benefit only at the expense of another. "Unchangeable" in this sense may be taken to mean that the European and global economies are seen as zero-sum games, though that economic concept did not yet exist in the mercantilist period.
Pre-test
13.The publishing of The Wealth of Nations 14.The Wealth of Nations represented a
marked the birth of modern capitalism as ______________ economics well as ____________.
Later building on the site where Smith wrote The Wealth of Nations
Life and Career

Adam Smith (1723 – 1790 ) was a Scottish social philosopher and a pioneer of political economy. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is the author of The Theory of Moral Sentiments and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations. The latter, usually abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations, is considered his magnum opus and the first modern work of economics.
Pre-test as Lead-in Background Information
Part III Text Study Part IV Questions and Answers
Pre-test
Blanks filling 1. On March 9, 1776, An Inquiry into
Adam Smith Historical and Cultural Background
Precedents / Predeterminations of the incident An Introduction of The Wealth of Nations
Adam Smith (1723-1790)
Pre-test
15. The Wealth of Nations is an
incredible book that represents the free-market birth of ____________ economics, but it's not without faults.
Background Information
the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (commonly referred to as simply The Wealth of Nations ) was published. ______________ 2. The core of Smith's thesis was that man's natural tendency toward ____________ , in modern terms, self-interest looking out for No.1 - results in prosperity.
Selective Readings and History of British Culture & Ideology
School of Foreign Studies Anhui Normal University
Unit 12 The Rewards
of the Professions
Part I Part II
clear leap forward in the field of economics, similar to Sir Isaac Newton's ___________________ for physics, Principia Mathematica Antoine Lavoisier's _____________________ TraitéÉ mentaire de Chimiefor chemistry, lé or Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Speciesfor biology. _________________
Life and Career


The Wealth of Nations earned him an enormous reputation and would become one of the most influential works on economics ever published. Smith is widely cited as the father of modern economics and capitalism. Smith studied social philosophy at the University of Glasgow and the University of Oxford. After graduation, he delivered a successful series of public lectures at Edinburgh, leading him to collaborate with David Hume during the Scottish Enlightenment.
Pre-test
Mercantilism 3. __________ held that wealth was fixed and finite, and that the only way to prosper was to hoard gold and tariff products from abroad. 4. Smith’s idea about modern economics was not original. The F.Turgot French economist ____________ had made the same point in 1766.
Pre-test

7. Smith launched a succession of freetrade economists and paved the way for David Ricardo’s and John Stuart Mill’s Comparative Advantage theories of ______________________ a generation later. 8. Smith saw the responsibilities of the government being limited to the ____________ defense of the nation, universal education, public works (infrastructure such as roads and bridges), the enforcement of legal rights (property rights and contracts) and the punishment of crime.
10. The only way to determine whether a
Pre-test
11.Because more of his ideas have
lasted than those of any other economist, some regard Adam the alpha and the omega Smith as __________________ of economic science. 12.Smith died on July 19, 1790, but the ideas he promoted live on. In 2007, the Bank of England even placed his image on the £ 20 ____________ note.
Life and Career
Smith obtained a professorship at Glasgow teaching moral philosophy, and during this time he wrote and published The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In his later life, he took a tutoring position that allowed him to travel throughout Europe, where he met other intellectual leaders of his day. Smith returned home and spent the next ten years writing The Wealth of Nations, publishing it in 1776. He died in 1790.
Pre-test
5. The free-market force became invisible hand known as the ____________,
which guided supply and demand.
6. The ideas Smith promoted generated international attention and helped to drive the move from land-based wealth to wealth created by assembly-line production methods driven by division of labor ____________.