Gap-filling activity (Instruction: start by guessing the words that are missing. Then read out the proposed list of vocabulary items belonging to the economics domain. Identify the grammar category of the missing word. Then draw a short list of possibilities. Analyse context of words. Only then choose your proposed item). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_economicus The term "economic man" was used for the first time in the late nineteenth century by critics of John Stuart Mill's work on ------------- economy. Below is a passage from Mill's work that critics referred to: [Political economy] does not treat the whole of man's nature as modified by the social state, nor of the whole conduct of man in society. It is concerned with him solely as a being who desires to possess wealth, and who is capable of judging the comparative ------------- of means for obtaining that end. Later in the same work, Mill stated that he was proposing "an arbitrary definition of man, as a being who inevitably does that by which he may obtain the greatest amount of necessaries, conveniences, and luxuries, with the smallest ------------- of labour and physical self-denial with which they can be obtained." Adam Smith, in the Theory of Moral Sentiments, had claimed that individuals have sympathy for the ------------- of others. On the other hand, in the Wealth of Nations, Smith wrote: It is not from the benevolence of the butcher, the brewer, or the baker that we expect our dinner, but from their regard to their own interest. This comment is perfectly in line with the notion of Homo economicus and the idea, propounded by Smith in The Wealth of Nations and, in the 20th century, by the likes of Ayn Rand (in The Virtue of Selfishness, for example), that pursuing narrow, individual ------------- promotes social well-being. In Book V, Chapter I, Smith argues, "The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple -------------, of which the effects are perhaps always the same, or very nearly the same, has no occasion to exert hi