Welcome back to Business English Pod for today’s lesson on analyzing trends during a presentation in English.
Business is a game of numbers. And whether you’re in marketing, finance, sales, or operations, you have different metrics that tell you whether you’re successful. Read any business report, and you’ll see these metrics presented in charts and graphs.
But charts and graphs aren’t enough on their own. Sure, you can use them to present a snapshot of the current state. And you can show how different numbers have gone up or down relative to other numbers. But so what? The numbers are only useful if we can analyze them, learn from them, and make better decisions with them.
When you analyze trends in a presentation, it’s a good idea to clearly state your approach from the beginning. Then you can do things like describe the rate of change and speculate about future developments. You might also make specific predictions about what will happen and raise people’s awareness of possible future trends.
In today’s dialog, we’ll rejoin a presentation at a mobile company called Ambient. A director named Pat has been presenting results for sales and market share. Now Pat is digging deeper and analyzing the company’s performance on one key metric: revenue per unit, or RPU.
Listening Questions
1. What is Pat going to compare in his approach to analyzing trends?
2. What does Pat predict about his company’s “RPU” in the future?
3. What possible future trend does Pat warn about at the end of the dialog?
Download: Podcast MP3
