Part Ⅲ Reading Comprehension

Passage I

The American economic system is organized around a basically private-enterprise, market- oriented economy in which consumers largely determine what shall be produced by spending their money in the marketplace for those goods and services that they want most. Private businessmen ,
striving to make profits , produce these goods and services in competition with other businessmen ;
and the profit motive , operating under competitive pressures , largely determines how these goods and services are produced. Thus, in the American eoonomic system it is the demand of individual consumers , coupled with the desire of businessmen to maximize profits and the desire of individu - als to maximize their incomes, that together determine what shall be produced and how resources are used to produce it.
An important factor in a market-oriented economy is the mechanism by which consumer de- mands can be expressed and responded to by producers. In the American economy, this mecha- nism is provided bv a price system, a process in which prices rise and fall in response to relative demands of consumers and supplies offered by seller-producers. If the product is in short supply relative to the demand , the price will be bid up and some consumers will be eliminated from the market. If, on the other hand, producing more of a commodity results in reducing its cost, this will tend to increase the supply offered by seller-producers, which in tum will lower the price and permit more consumers to buy the product. Thus, price is the regulating mechanism in the Amer- ican economic system .
The important factor in a private-enterprise economy is that individuals are allowed to own productive resources (private propeny) , and they are permitted to hire

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