晨讀英語(yǔ)美文100篇四級(jí)Salaries
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Salaries
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Economists and experts on wages have long tried to discover
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what factors were influencing people’s salaries.
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Most of the factors they listed one or two centuries ago
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are still important today.
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One of those is education: college graduates have earned
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and are still earning more than workers
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who have only finished high school,
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and high-school graduates earn more than workers
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who didn’t complete their studies there.
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The difficulty and length of preparation for a profession
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also plays a part in the size of the salary.
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Danger and responsibility make a difference too —
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the man or woman in charge of a project,
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the person performing a difficult or dangerous task,
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the airplane pilot responsible for many human lives,
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usually get a proper compensation for their pains.
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And yet there are exceptions to those rules.
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Due to the needs of modern industry,
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technicians with no college education are now commanding high salaries,
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much closer to the college graduates'salaries
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than they used to be in the past.
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And there are many jobs in which danger
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doesn’t bring much compensation.
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Why doesn’t a fireman earn more than a postal clerk, for example?
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And what about the policeman and the coal miner,
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who risk their lives for a modest salary?
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The answer is simple.
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Actually, salaries are governed by a combination of factors,
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the most important being one known as the law of supply and demand,
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which says that the value of goods and services
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is determined by the quantity available
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compared with the number of possible buyers.
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If there are more chickens on the market than people wishing to buy them,
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the price of poultry goes down.
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If the number of specialized engineers
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is much larger than the number of positions open to them,
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the salaries drop even for the most impressive applicants.
