Course Content
Business English Course
About Lesson

Shadowing Exercise 1: 

Listen to each statement from an American English speaker. Then try to repeat each phrase to practice talking like a native English speaker.

Shadowing Exercise Transcript:

  • He is always looking for new ways to turn a profit with his business ideas.
  • Let’s hope we can generate a healthy return on these investments next quarter.
  • We plan to grow our balance sheet over the next few months.
  • We need to brainstorm some ways to boost the bottom line.
  • We’re getting better with our expenses, but we’re not out of the woods yet.

Shadowing Exercise 2:

Listen to each statement from an American English speaker. Then try to repeat each phrase to practice talking like a native English speaker.

Shadowing Exercise Transcript:
  • The old CFO held too tightly to ideas that never played out and actually erode profitability over time.
  • Let’s try making it a multi-year allocation for tax purposes and see if that helps.
  • I hate to say it, but we can always consider reducing head count in that department.
  • We don’t want to give too many employees spending authority or we will start to lose track of expenses real quick.
  • We just need to trim operating costs a bit, not slash the whole budget.

Shadowing Exercise 3:

Listen to each statement from an American English speaker. Then try to repeat each phrase to practice talking like a native English speaker.

Shadowing Exercise Transcript:

  • The last guy in your position was fired for mismanaging funds.
  • Although our fixed are low, we have so many variable costs that it’s difficult to get an accurate projection of costs for the year.
  • We hired this new accountant who should help us avoid more taxes without evading taxes.
  • What do you think of the company’s new benefits package?
  • Sales teams often use a performance-related pay scale for determining salaries.

Speaking Exercise 1:

Pretend you’re at a small networking event or at a work lunch with employees from another company. One of your acquaintances from another company asks you a series of questions about how your company is doing, including financially. As you hear each question in the recording, pause the recording to answer and press the record button to record your answer. Then press play on the recording again to continue to the next question. Repeat this until you’ve answered all the questions on the recording. Use at least 1 phrase from the lesson in each of your answers.

  1. How is your company or department doing financially on the whole these days?
  2. What ways has the company/department tried to increase profit overall this past year
  3. Have you had to slash any budgets this last year? Or just trim costs?
  4. What other ideas do you have for how your company can increase revenue this coming year?

Press the button to start recording (Please state your name and phone)

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Speaking Exercise 2:

The HBR article discusses financial decisions about growth and efficiency. Record 3 voice messages answering these questions:

  1. Are growth and efficiency at odds with each other or can they be achieved at the same time? If they can be achieved at the same time, how?
  2. What are the variables in the productivity equation that the article talks about?
  3. What does the article say businesses could do to “raise their working capital game”?