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Describing Data

Course video 21 of 46

In Week 4, you will go over marketing ideas financial vocabulary, and review lectures on making presentations.

Business English: Capstone Project

华盛顿大学

课程 5（共 5 门，商务英语沟通技巧专项课程）

The capstone project will give you opportunities to demonstrate your competence in the learning objectives for this Specialization. For the project, you’ll use formal, written methods and more casual visual and audio methods of communication to demonstrate your ability to use language appropriate for different business contexts. The goal of this course is to demonstrate competence in writing and presenting a plan using skills and language appropriate for business. Course Learning Objectives • Use appropriate vocabulary to write a mini business plan • Communicate a business plan orally in an organized and engaging presentation

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教学方

Richard Moore
Extension Lecturer, International & English Language Programs

脚本

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Now, let's move on to talk about relationships that we express when

describing data.

We often need to house to say how frequently something occurs.

Two out of three is a very common expression.

For example, two out of three customers preferred the blue one.

One out of every seven minutes is spent on Facebook.

And did you know that one in four Americans eats fast food every day.

So the important thing to notice here is phrases.

Two out of three or one in four, but

also notice the verb, it agrees with the first number.

So two out of three is plural, one out of seven minutes is singular.

You might wonder, why not just say 66% instead of 2 out of 3?

The reason is for emphasis.

If you say 66% of the people it seems kind of general.

But if you say, 2 out of 3 it seems like wow, that's a lot.

Or we could say,

15% of the time that people are on the Internet they're on Facebook.

That's saying,

1 out of every 7 minutes online spent on Facebook sounds much more dramatic.

So you can use this to emphasize frequency.

Of course, percentages are very important in many cases when we report on data.

We say the word point for the decimal, and we use the word percent.

For example, 18.5% or she got 49.2% of the vote.

When you use percentages in sentences,

the following words determine whether the verb is singular or plural.

Let me show you a couple of examples, I think you know about count and

noncount nouns, right?

Okay, so look at these two sentences.

20% of the jobs are part-time.

Jobs is a count noun and it's plural here so the verb is also plural.

In the next sentence, work is noncount so look at the verb, it's singular.

20% of the work is already finished.

Okay, you try it.

What would the verbs be in this sentences?

If a noun is countable it will be plural after this expressions which we

call quantifiers.

The majority of people speak English here.

The number of students increased.

Be careful about he word number, look at the sentences, would you use is or are?

The first one is singular.

The number of students is surprising, it refers to a number like 100.

The second is plural because it has the same meaning as some.

A number of students are finished with the course already.

There's a difference between percent and percentage.

Use percent when you could use the percentage sign in other words,

when you use a number.

There was a 20% increase.

The rate increased by 20%.

Use percentage when you can replace the word with number or rate.

The percentage was greater in the second quarter.

The increase in the percentage of people without jobs was surprising.

Next, we're going to look at list that rank things first to last.

This chart represents the amount tourists spent abroad.

You can see that Chinese tourist spent the most, but

let's describe the ranking first to last.

Think about how would you express the ranking?

Did you come up with any of these possibilities.

All of this start with the name of the country.

>> China was first in the amount its tourist spent abroad.

The US was second.

China was number one in tourist dollars spent abroad.

Germany was number three.

China ranked first in the amount tourists spent abroad.

Brazil ranked tenth.

>> So, you can see it's a good idea to know the ordinal numbers that express

the order in a list for ranking.

1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th,

8th, 9th, 10th, 11th, 12th, and so on.

We looked at ways to make comparisons in our course on meetings, and

also in negotiations.

So let's see how we use comparisons in talking about data.

A simple comparison would be describing nouns in subject position.

Here's some examples looking at budget or low cost travel to various cities.

Think about how you would compare Pokhara and Zurich.

You could say, Pokhara isn't as expensive as Zurich or

Pokhara is less expensive than Zurich.

Zurich is more expensive than Pokhara.

You can also add an intensifier here.

Pokhara is much less expensive than Zurich.

Zurich is much more expensive than Pokhara, or you could use a lot more.

Zurich is a lot more expensive than Pokhara.

If there's not such a big difference you could use the word slightly.

Zurich is slightly more expensive than New York or

a little, Zurich is a little more expensive.

In informal English, we would say a little bit instead of slightly.

It's a little bit more expensive, but

if you want to sound more formal, you can use slightly.

Okay, your turn.

How about Cuzco?

You can do the same thing and say, Cuzco is more expensive than Pokhara.

And you could also say, by how much?

We could use twice as much.

Cuzco is twice as expensive as Pokhara.

And then, how much more expensive is Zurich than Cuzco?

Zurich is four times as expensive as Cuzco or

just, Zurich is four times as expensive.

So those are various ways to compare two things.

You can also the superlative.

Pokhara is the least expensive.

Zurich is the most expensive.

Here are some other possibilities of the superlative.

Zurich is the most expensive.

The cost in Zurich is the highest.

The cost in Pokhara is the lowest.

And if you want to intensify this, you can use an expression like by far.

Of course,

an easy way to talk about the cities in the chart is to use the verb costs.

It costs less to stay in Pokhara.

Zurich costs the most.

So let's go back to the tourism spending chart to talk in more detail about

comparisons with verbs.

Instead of using the name of a country, China ranks first, etc.

Let's use tourists or people from China as the subject, and

the verb spend or in this case, past tense, spent.

So you could say, Chinese tourists spent more abroad than tourists from the US.

And about Brazil, you can say,

tourists from Brazil spent less than tourists From China.

And again, you can make it stronger or

weaker by saying much more or slightly more.

You can also use the superlative when you're just considering one

group compared to all the rest.

Now, using the same sentence lets rank again.

US tourist spent the second highest amount.

German tourists accounted for the third highest spending, etc.

You can also use words like twice as much or half as much.

We've talked about ranking and comparing how different things are.

When you talk about similarity or close similarity,

you may use expressions like these.

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