Welcome Tim Martin,
ODE has a new CEO, Tim Martin. Tim is from Chicago, Illinois. He brings 20 years of experience in business and a ton of positive thinking to ODE. I can speak from meetings with Tim that he’s excited about the future of ODE and ready to do what it takes to improve the website, the quality of the lessons, and customer service. The reason that Tim was brought on to the team (aside from his general excellence) was that the other owners of On Demand Training (ODE’s parent company) Ken Carroll, Steve Williams, and Brian McCloskey, wanted to take a step back and focus on other projects. They knew that ODE deserved the attention of someone with great business knowledge and personal character - thus they searched for and found Tim.
ODE’s definitely in good hands. Good luck Tim,
Kris
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
There was an interesting article on America’s trade deficit in the news today - here. Apparently, in 2006 the U.S. trade deficit will be 790 billion dollars.
What is a deficit? It means you are short of something or don’t have enough of something. A ‘trade deficit’ simply means a country imports more goods than it exports. The opposite, when a country exports more than it imports, is a ‘trade surplus’. So Americans import a LOT more than they export to other countries.
American news often has stories about the U.S. trade deficit, especially during the periods before elections (as we had recently). These news articles usually focus on why there is a deficit, not necessarily on what the results might be because of a deficit.
Let’s look at some examples of how to use this word:
a huge deficit
a massive deficit
a small deficit
run up a deficit (allow it to grow larger)
cut a deficit
reduce a deficit
tackle a deficit (deal with it, make it smaller and more manageable)
overcome a deficit
the deficit grew
the deficit rose
the deficit widened last month (got larger)
the deficit decreased
the deficit fell
the deficit narrowed
the deficit shrank
As you can see, a lot of times we speak about past or future deficits, so make sure you have the correct verb form.
What do you think of the new website? Yes, yes, it’s very similar to the old website www.englishpod.com. However, there are going to be many big changes over the coming weeks.
We want your input on these changes. What do you like, and what don’t you like? Tell us about everything, from the colors and pictures to the learning tools and level difficulty. All of it is open for you to comment on.
We’re currently working to distinguish the website as Englishpod - updating all of the logos, links and email addresses. If you experience a problem, or notice something wrong, don’t hesitate to send an email to info@ondemand-english.com.
With this new website, we want to add to the experience of our users. One way is to make it easier to find what you want. If you’d like to study telephone English, go to the Podcast Archive, where all of the lessons are located and search tools make it simple to get your lessons ‘on demand.’ Got more suggestions? - send us an email or comment on this blog.
Hi all,
Englishpod is open for business on our new url www.ondemand-english.com. We hope you’ll continue to visit the website, download the podcasts and study business English with us.
Make sure to leave us your comments, either on the podcast discussion pages, here on the blog, or you can email us at info@ondemand-english.com (we’re also going to add a forum this fall). We want to know what you like and what you don’t like about our site and the lessons we bring you. We read each and every one of your comments, and we’ll do our best to give answers to your questions and improve our website and lessons according to your wishes and needs.
Good to have you all here, we hope you enjoy learning with Englishpod.
Hi Everyone,
EnglishPod is going to change names. We will now be known as Englishpod and our new website address will be www.ondemand-english.com.
Why the name change? Well, our parent company is On Demand Training, and we felt that the corporate brands should all share the On Demand label. The podcasts and online learning tools will still be made by the same people and our commitment to providing you with the best English study resource will only grow stronger.
Tell us what you think of the new name. The idea of “On Demand” is that the product is convenient to use and it’s personalized. You can listen to the MP3’s anywhere you want, you can request lessons, you can use the online resources wherever you have computer access (home, work, while traveling, etc.) It’s English learning, “on your terms.”
Hope to see you all at the new website soon. The old www.englishpod.com website will be turned into a redirect site (sending you to the new site). For now, everything looks the same, but we’ll be changing the names, the logos and some of the look and feel of the website. The old lessons will all be there and many new ones will follow.
See you there,
