GLOSSARY

A 1. effect is the reason why no person in the time of recession can 2. assured that his or her job is safe. In the same way small waves created after something is dropped into the water generate new ones, what happens to one person will 3. ripple a ripple effect on all the others since we are all part of the same economic ocean. What happens in the time of recession is a loss of jobs which then sparks a ripple or 4. reaction that hits a lot of other businesses.

A person who has lost a job will cancel various services which they can now do on their own or do not have the need for them at all. Instead of going to a gym, they work out at home and instead of hiring a person to maintain their lawns, they do the work themselves. Obviously, train services they used to commute to work or delis which they frequented during lunch breaks are experiencing their business 5. dwindle which is in turn leading to more job losses. This 6. off a domino effect in which payment slows down and everybody then has problems paying their creditors.

The other services that consumers who are anticipating bad news are 7. back on are holidays and dining out. All of a sudden, in what are now felt to be hard times, cars, cable TVs and various technical gadgets are becoming a luxury. In that sense the crisis is indeed changing people’s lifestyles but not always for the worse. The 8. lining to it can be seen in having more time on your hands to spend with the family and friends.

However, such benefits of unemployment can enjoy only those few whose severance package was generous enough to 9. their fall from the world of work to the ‘between the jobs status’, as optimists call it. This can indeed be a beginning of the end of consumerism and the belief that buying and selling large quantities of consumer goods is beneficial to an economy. Americans who actually started it all up by substituting plastic for a piggy bank have now realised that they should start saving money for rainy days.

Although this realization 10. in only after rainy days had 11. in, it might mark a beginning of a new era. Consumers who were beginning to get 12. of buying mass of things they did not really need now seem to 13.** the opportunity to stick to buying only necessities. On the other hand, holding onto one’s money too tightly slows the economy further.

Whenever there are signs of an economic slowdown, companies undertake measures to 14. costs by putting pay on 15.. There are some rare cases when management 16. **bonuses but usually it is workers who accept pay freeze and short-time working for all instead of redundancies for some.