..........into the workforce in the West and, ... has helped forge an interdependent global Fill the Blank: Several factors have combined to transform the more mature industrial economies, notably an increasing emphasis on service industries, information management, electronic industries, and biotechnology. The entry of substantial numbers of. increasingly, elsewhere has effected great social and economic change. The emergence of economic system. Some multinational corporations are wealthier than whole countries, and to a considerable extent they rival the importance of many nations and national economic policies. For example, in the year 2000 Microsoft was the tenth largest economic enterprise in the world; Intel and Exxon-Mobil were said to be larger economic entities than South Korea or Brazil. The point explains much about industrial civilization today. New techniques and new industries called for new approaches to the solution of technical problems. Over the centuries traditional technologies had acquired refined rules of thumb. But for steel suspension bridges, electrical devices, airplanes, plastics, and the many innovations that followed in rapid succession in the nineteenth, twentieth, and now twentieth-first centuries there were no traditional rules of thumb and no time for them to be derived from experience. Instead, rules derived from science increasingly took their place, and the merger of modern science and the new technologies created a scientific-industrial culture. The universities were brought into technology, and governments were brought into science. University-trained engineers, still a small minority in the nineteenth century, became the norm in the twentieth century and beyond. Since World War II, the skyrocketing costs of ....... .........have necessitated government patronage of scientific research, which was justified by the public benefits of its technological spinoff. Antibiotics and the atomic bomb are the emblems, beneficial and baleful, of the application of theoretical science to practical problems in the twentieth century. O physicists; communication systems; rocket science O computers; medical companies; renewable energies O women; the multinational corporation; Big Science