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If you’d like a test to see how your business English vocabulary is, read the article at this link.

Some of the language is quite difficult. The main point of the story is that a very rich man (Kerkorian) is going to sell a large amount of the shares he owns in General Motors. The reason why this is newsworthy is because Kerkorian is a billionaire (has more than 1,000 million dollars) and owns a fairly large amount of GM’s shares (currently 9.9%). This article uses language that is typical of news stories about shareholdings in major American companies. Let’s go over some of the key vocabulary.

stake (n.) - this has the same meaning as share; a percentage of the company. (Remember, stocks and shares are essentially the same, but a share of a company refers to the percentage owned, not the piece of paper we also refer to as a stock.)
His stake in the company rose to 15%.
500 shares were added to her stake in the company.

Solely owned (adjective) - when a person (or company) owns 100% of a company; they own all of the shares.

GM shares closed down.
GM shares closed up.
- these two sentences refer to the price of GM’s shares when the stock market closed. It compares the opening price, the price when the markets open, and the closing price.

speculate - to guess
We can only speculate why he’s selling his shares.

walk away from - to abandon (a plan), to cancel, to forget about
He walked away from a really good job offer because he decided to do volunteer work instead.
They walked away from the new product idea because of technical difficulties.

Great language in this article. There may be other words you don’t quite understand, but the ones I’ve highlighted should clear up the basic meaning of the story. Reading newspapers is extremely difficult, but for those of you who are advanced or upper intermediate learners, it can really add to your vocabulary.

Kris

Good news,

We’re now able to provide the rollover for collocations and phrases. Go to the Review Materials for each new lesson and find the rollover works not only for individual words, but also commonly used collocations or phrases whose meanings are not obvious from the words that make them up.

This new feature is part of our overall philosophy - that language learning is not about learning words, but useable “chunks” or blocks of English. These chunks are more than one word, but they’re not whole sentences. They are natural combinations of different words that form ideas. Learning collocations and phrases helps us discover that we “take a seat” or “have a seat.” If you learn the word ‘take’ by itself, it has too many possible meanings and uses - we need to learn it in context and as part of natural combinations with other words (in this case, take is a verb, and it is used naturally with many nouns and some adverbs). Otherwise, you will end up speaking Chinese-English or Italian-English, etc., mixing up parts of your native language (and it’s grammar - particularly word order and collocations) with English.

We hope you enjoy this new feature. I’m confident it makes Englishpod a better product. Step by step we’re getting better. Any thoughts on how we can improve more?

Blogs have already become part of the mainstream media. Now, corporations are finding uses for them, too.

Blogs are a great way for a company to share information and news about itself to employees, customers and investors. Blog posts can be made regularly form a record of the blogger’s thoughts and the company’s fortunes. Anyone can go to the website for free with no registration or subscribe to receive news updates via RSS. They are also a great way to get feedback (again, from employees, customers, and investors).

Johnathan Schwartz, CEO of Sun Microsystems, has been blogging for 2 years and is now asking that the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) allow companies to release investor related information to the public via blogs on their website. He argues that given the fact that investors could be located worldwide, the internet is even more accessible than the typical press release or the Wall Street Journal. What this means is that instead of holding a teleconference or issuing a press release, a company could simply blog about news that investors need to know, which the SEC could still supervise and regulate. See Mr. Schwartz’s blog, and a newspaper article about it here.

Key language from this post:
mainstream media
-the media are things we use to get information or entertainment from, such as newspapers and TV; it is mainstream if most or many people use it or think of it as common
blog posts
-post here comes from its older use as a verb “to post a letter’, i.e. send something by mail or to “post a note or bill” which meant to put up a public notice; blog posts are when a person writes a new entry and puts it on their blog
the company’s fortunes
-whether the company does well or poorly; its luck
subscribe
-to become a member; to receive something regularly, as in a newspaper, magazine - recently internet sites for newspapers or blogs allow users to subscribe and receive new posts automatically using RSS
RSS
-(Really Simple Syndication) A distribution format that was developed by Netscape in 1999 and became very popular for sending and receiving updates to blogs and the latest news from websites
Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
-the U.S. government’s agency that protects investors by making and enforcing rules for companies that offer shares on the stock markets
release information via blogs
-to use blogs to publish information; via often means ‘through’ , ‘using’ or ‘by this way’.
press release
-to give out information to ‘the press’, which usually means newspapers, TV, radio and their associated reporters

Copyright is a noun meaning “[t]he legal right granted to an author, composer, playwright, publisher, or distributor to exclusive publication, production, sale, or distribution of a literary, musical, dramatic, or artistic work.” Thanks to The Free Dictionary by Farlex for the definition.

Copyright is another form of Intellectual Property law (blogged about here) that protects writers of books, photographers, song writers, etc., and helps them to keep control over the sale of their work. No one can copy their work without permission. Copyright used to be automatic, but these days it’s safer to write “Copyright Kris Fedorak, 2003-2006″ just to warn people who might copy your work. For a thorough but difficult to understand (very advanced English required) explanation of copyright in the U.S. see here. A very good article dealing with common misunderstandings of copyright can be found here.

I myself am not a big fan of copyright laws. I think they’re too restrictive and protect works for too long. Why must everything we create be about money, and commercial benefit? My main problem is with music. Live music (i.e. a concert) I’ll pay for. I’ll pay good money to see someone perform their music and enjoy music the way it’s supposed to be - live! Once “recorded”, the music is already just a copy - a copy of that singer’s voice, of that band’s music. Why pay for the stale and standardized sound of the music record companies? Pay for live music. However, this is just my opinion and not that of EnglishPod or On Demand Training.

To finish off, here are some common collocations to help you use this important business word:
protected by copyright
copyright law
a copyright agreement
copyright material
copyrighted material (used as a transitive verb here)
copyright infringement

Trademarks are symbols, pictures, marks, words or other characteristics that companies use to identify their products and services and distinguish them from others. We see trademarks everyday on the products we buy. Usually they have a ^TM or ® beside them. Trademarks cannot be generic terms. For example, if a company sells rice, they cannot simply call their product “Rice” because it doesn’t establish a difference between their product and the rice produced by other companies.

Trademark rights arise from the use and/or registration of the trademark. In British/American law, if a company commonly uses a trademark in the market, other companies are expected to refrain (stop themselves) from using that mark. A company can also register their trademark in a trademarks office/registry.

Trademark law gives the holders of a trademark the right to exclusive use of that mark. If another company uses that trademark, they have infringed on the trademark rights. There have been many famous cases of trademark infringement over the years, such as the ongoing battle between Lacoste and Crocodile International throughout Asia. A good example of a clear case of trademark infringement involved Starbucks and a competitor in China – see the China Law Blog for a description of the case. Trademark Law is an ever-growing area of IP Law – I even found a blog entirely about trademarks here.

Common collocations for “trademark”

trademark rights
trademark infringement
register a trademark
a registered trademark
trademark use

IP (one of those annoying acronyms I’ve complained about) stands for Intellectual Property.

There are 3 kinds of property:
-Real Property (land, houses)
-Personal Property (your watch, car, clothes)
-Intellectual Property

IP is really the ownership of your ideas. Ideas can be powerful, and they can make money.
For example, if you write a book, but someone steals your idea and sells a million copies of it, it’s unfair, right? So how can we protect ourselves from IP theft? There are several tools: Trademarks, Patents, Copyright and Licensing.

Anyone know what each of these tools are and how to use them in a sentence? Check back here soon and I’ll post more blogs about them.

This just in: layaway is a payment option of the past.

Wal-Mart announced that it will end its layaway service on November 19th this year. see article here

What is layaway? Do you use it in your country?

Layaway is a form of payment where the buyer can reserve goods by giving the seller a deposit and may collect the goods when the balance of the price is paid in full. For example, you want to buy a barbeque from Wal-Mart, but it’s $500 and you don’t have that much money right now. You reserve the barbeque by paying a deposit, say $50, but you cannot take the barbeque home until you pay the remaining $400. The best part is, there’s no interest charges! If the customer cannot pay with a certain time (for Wal-Mart, normally 60 days), the layaway is cancelled and the customer gets their money back (though there is usually a small charge of about $10 or so).

Layaway is different from using a credit card because when you purchase goods with a credit card you may take them immediately, but you must pay interest, usually somewhere between 10-20% in North America.

Layaway is still popular on more expensive items that might have limited supply, or during Christmas season, when the most popular toys can become sold out long before Dec. 25. For a great article on layaway’s advantages and tips for using it, see here.

This week’s word of the day is “FDI”. Well, actually it’s not one word, but three. Today you get a three for one deal!

FDI stands for foreign direct investment. It simply refers to when a company invests money in another country by buying a company there or by creating its own. So for example, if an American company builds a factory in Canada, that is FDI. Foreigners are directly investing in the Canadian economy. Indirect investment normally involves financial institutions buying smaller amounts of shares or bonds in another country.

FDI is one of the major indicators of a country’s economic health and its potential for growth. A great definition (and the only useful one I found) is located here. It was made by The Economist, a first-rate magazine dealing with world economics and politics.

FDI is often spoken of in the news, especially with regard to developing countries. The USA is the largest recipient of FDI each year, followed by China. Some people say that governments and economists over-emphasize FDI numbers. What do you think?

Hello everyone,

Welcome to the first “word of the week”, though it may happen more often than just once a week.

Today’s word is bankrupt, normally used as a noun or as an adjective. We’ll also look at the general noun bankruptcy.
The meaning according to the Free Online Dictionary (a great resource) is:

Noun
-a debtor that, upon voluntary petition or one invoked by the debtor’s creditors, is judged legally insolvent. The debtor’s remaining property is then administered for the creditors or is distributed among them.

Adj.
a. Having been legally declared financially insolvent.
b. Financially ruined; impoverished.

What does all this mean? It means a person or company doesn’t have enough money to pay its debts (money it owes to people called “creditors”). So if you owe a bank lots of money but your job doesn’t pay you enough to give you the ability to pay the bank back (= you’re insolvent), you can declare yourself “bankrupt.” When you do this the court appoints a person to control your finances, selling much of your property and paying the people you owe money to. In the end you won’t have much, but your finances will be in order and your old creditors can no longer claim money from you. For practical advice on bankruptcies (and some reading practice) see this website.

After declaring “bankruptcy”, the general noun for this idea, it is more difficult to get bank loans or credit cards (financial institutions won’t trust you as much). However, many famous people have filed for bankruptcy (including Rembrandt, Mark Twain, Henry Ford, Walt Disney) and many have become successful afterwards. In America, the federal law regulating bankruptcy is divided into chapters, so you will often hear or read references to “Chapter 11″ or “Chapter 7.”

Ways to use it: sentences
He is bankrupt.
He is nearly bankrupt.
The company went bankrupt 10 years ago.
They will declare bankruptcy tomorrow.
She filed for bankruptcy.
She filed for Chapter 11.
There were many bankruptcies last month.

Ways to use it: collocations:
be bankrupt
become bankrupt
go bankrupt
declare someone bankrupt
almost bankrupt
nearly bankrupt
personal bankruptcy
face bankruptcy
be close to bankruptcy
be forced into bankruptcy
file for bankruptcy
be saved from bankruptcy
bankruptcy order
the threat of bankruptcy

Ok, that’s enough for bankrupt I think. If you have any questions, follow the links or comment here and we’ll get back to you as soon as we can.

Kris