Salaries
Economists and experts on wages have long tried to discover what factors were influencing people’s salaries.Most of the factors they listed one or two centuries ago are still important today.One of those is education: college graduates have earned and are still earning more than workers who have only finished high school,and high-school graduates earn more than workers who didn’t complete their studies there.
The difficulty and length of preparation for a profession also plays a part in the size of the salary.Danger and responsibility make a difference too —the man or woman in charge of a project,the person performing a difficult or dangerous task,the airplane pilot responsible for many human lives,usually get a proper compensation for their pains.And yet there are exceptions to those rules.Due to the needs of modern industry,technicians with no college education are now commanding high salaries,much closer to the college graduates'salaries than they used to be in the past.
And there are many jobs in which danger doesn’t bring much compensation.Why doesn’t a fireman earn more than a postal clerk, for example?And what about the policeman and the coal miner,who risk their lives for a modest salary?The answer is simple.Actually, salaries are governed by a combination of factors,the most important being one known as the law of supply and demand,which says that the value of goods and services is determined by the quantity available compared with the number of possible buyers.
If there are more chickens on the market than people wishing to buy them, the price of poultry goes down.If the number of specialized engineers is much larger than the number of positions open to them, the salaries drop even for the most impressive applicants.
工资
经济学家和工资专家长期以来一直试图发现影响人们工资的因素。他们在一两个世纪前列出的大多数因素在今天仍然很重要。其中之一是教育：大学毕业生比只完成高中学业的工人挣得多，而且现在仍然在挣得多，高中毕业生比没有完成学业的工人挣得多。
危险和责任也有影响--负责一个项目的男人或女人，执行困难或危险任务的人，对许多人的生命负责的飞机驾驶员，通常为他们的压力得到适当的补偿。但这些规则也有例外。由于现代工业的需要，没有受过大学教育的技术人员现在获得了高薪，比过去更接近大学毕业生的工资。
例如，为什么消防员的收入不比邮递员高?那么警察和煤矿工人呢，他们冒着生命危险获得微薄的工资?答案很简单。实际上，工资受多种因素的制约，其中最重要的是所谓的供求法则，即商品和服务的价值由可用数量和可能的买家数量决定。
如果市场上的鸡比希望购买它们的人多，家禽的价格就会下降。如果专业工程师的数量远远大于向他们开放的职位数量，即使是最令人印象深刻的申请人，工资也会下降。
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