1. Прочитайте и переведите текст на русский язык. Задайте по содержанию текста 3 вопроса и дайте на них ответы. The Company Man Alfred P. Sloan Is a company as important as a country? Are the interests of a business the same as the interests of a nation? Most people would answer 'no' to both questions. But when you're talking about General Motors you can't be so sure. Certainly, when the General Motors manager, Charles E. Wilson, said those words at a meeting with the US government in the early 1950s, nobody was surprised. At the time, General Motors was the biggest company in the world - it employed more than 750,000 people. It made some of the most famous products in the world - cars with names like Chevrolet, Cadillac and Buick. It was also the richest company in the world and it sometimes made profits of over $2 billion. But perhaps most important of all, General Motors' boss, Alfred P. Sloan, was the most admired businessman of the last century. Sloan was admired because his ideas were copied by every other big business in the middle years of the twentieth century. He was admired because he had created a company that was bigger and more powerful than many small, rich countries. But his colleagues knew the real reason for Sloan's success; he was a man who always put business first. Sloan had no children and no interests outside work. He rarely saw his wife because he often slept in a small bed at the General Motors offices. In fact, he took his job so seriously that he didn't even allow himself to have any friends. 'Some people like to be alone,' he once said. 'I don't. But I have a duty not to have friends in the workplace.' Sloan became the boss of General Motors in the early 1920s, at a time when the company was having serious problems. GM had been started by the US businessman, Billy Durant. Durant collected companies like some people collect stamps. He owned companies that made everything from cars to fridges. He thought that if he owned enough companies, one or two of them were certain to be successful.
