According to Donald Trump, “trade wars are easy to win.” 然而, as usual, reality appears to contradict Trump’s claims. In the current dispute between the U.S. and China, it doesn’t look like a winner will emerge any time soon. As CNN notes:
The Trump administration made good on its threat to raise tariffs on $200 billion worth of Chinese exports from 10% 至 25%, marking a sharp rise in tensions between the world’s two largest economies. After months of talks aimed at ending a year-long dispute that has already hurt global growth and rattled stock markets around the world, the latest US salvo risks triggering a new wave of tit-for-tat responses.
歡迎回到 商務英語播客for today’s商務英語詞彙lesson on how to describe company performance.
Every company’s goal is to make a profit. But how they go about that is different. Different industries, different business models, different approaches – There’s no simple recipe for success. And there’s no simple, single way to measure whether a company is performing well.
代替, we look at many different factors when we measure company performance. We’ve also got a lot of different expressions in English for discussing the topic. And many of theseEnglish expressionsare what we call “collocations.”
What’s a collocation? 出色地, it’s just a natural combination of words. Ever heard the expressions “turn a profit” or “boost the bottom line?” We don’t say “grow a profit” or “up the bottom line.” Those simply aren’t natural collocations. And if you say something like that, you won’t sound natural.
So studying collocations is a great way to sound more natural with your vocabulary. You can learn combinations of words, rather than single words on their own. As you listen to the dialog today, try to pick out some of these collocations, 我們將稍後在匯報中討論它們.
在對話方塊中, we’ll rejoin a meeting at a private equity firm. Three colleagues, 瑪麗亞, 克勞迪婭, 和泰勒, are talking about some of the companies they’ve invested in. They’ll use lots of great collocations as they discuss the performance of these companies.
聽力問題
1. What does Claudia think about SmartMoney? 2. What does Taylor think they should do before selling off SmartMoney? 3. What has Claudia been focusing on with Byron Industries?
Early energy sources were simple; fire was discovered to heat things, and then along came conversion – such as fire under a kettle producing steam. But times have changed, and the impact of using non-renewable sources of energy, or fossil fuels, is one that we can no longer afford to ignore. Putting the climate change debate aside, there are real commercial opportunities that businesses and governments can, and should, consider.
Emerging markets have been through a lot over the past few years: The oil-price drop in 2014; China’s botched devaluation of its currency in 2015; and India’s bungled “demonetization” in late 2016. 今年, 然而, seems to be putting all that in the past, particularly for India. The BRIC nation has made strides in all areas which has led to a boom in business
