Welcome back to the communication lesson of this course, how have you been? Have you given a presentation lately, where you have had to use charts and were overwhelmed by the numbers you had to speak about? Or maybe you weren't sure how to express yourself clearly? Well, if that's the case, todays lesson will definitely come in handy because we will be taking a look at how to describe graphs and charts as well has how to express large numbers. In our phone call with John, Catherine mentions information about sales, cost of sales, and general expenses. She also offers to help John compare the budget to the prior year results. Have you ever had to speak about some of these topics during a meeting? Do you remember when one of the board members says, the cost of sales is quite a bit higher than what was budgeted. Here's an example of what Catherine's graph might have looked like. Now, what if we had some additional information from previous years? Let's take a look. So what language could we use to describe the changes we see in this graph? Well, we can certainly say that the cost of sales has fluctuated over the last few years and the budget has increased steadily. Which verbs did I use in those examples? You're right. Fluctuated and increased are correct. Now, here are a few more charts and graphs and the words we use to describe them. As you can see, there are several key terms we can use to describe graphs. So go ahead and grab a pen and paper and write these down. You never know when you might need them. There are verbs we tend to use more than others to describe charts. Please be aware that you may want to look into using them in the correct tense depending on the situation. Here are some useful verbs you would use to describe that numbers are going up. Increase, peak, climb and here are some verbs we would use to describe that numbers are going down. Decrease, drop, fall, decline. To show change, we can use the word fluctuate. And to talk about numbers remaining the same, we can use the word stabilize. All these verbs are regular verbs except one. Can you find the irregular verb? That's right, the verb fall is an irregular verb, so be careful when using it in the past tense. Then, you would say fell, or with the past participle you would need fallen. Now, we can also use these verbs along with certain adverbs in order to express ourselves better, and be able to emphasize our point when presenting. Let's take a look at some examples. Increase slightly, decrease slowly, peak sharply, drop suddenly, fall quickly, climb steadily, decline drastically. Now it's important I mention that we may not always have to use adverbs with the words fluctuate and stabilize. We can also say something like sales fluctuate every quarter, or our expenses stabilized at the end of the year. Would you like to try describing the next few graphs? Go ahead, and don't forget to use some of the words we just studied. Way to go, describing a graph is not always easy, It takes practice. Become familiar with the charts you'll be presenting, but before we finish, we have one more quick topic to touch upon. And this has to do with with expressing large numbers. How many times have you been in a situation where you had to talk about big figures and were not sure if you were saying them correctly? Well let me give you a few tips. First, remember that in English we use commas to separate large numbers instead of periods and we separate them in threes. Let's take a look at some examples using international currencies, $1,250,000, 45,678 Euros, 89,000 Yen. Although we write the symbol before the number, we say the name of the currency after the number. For example, even though there's a dollar sign at the beginning of this number, 526 is pronounced five hundred and twenty six. Now let's try and practice saying the following numbers correctly. How did you do? Let's go over the answers. $25,937. 52,847,963 euros. 9,186,203 yen. Well done everyone. Next, it's also important to remember that you might run into British English, and American English differences when using and with these numbers. For example, if your audience speaks American English, they will say twenty five thousand, nine hundred thirty-seven instead of twenty five thousand, nine hundred and thirty seven, as it would be said in British English. So as we wrap up our lesson, what are some key takeaways from today? Let's reflect on what we've covered. We have a variety of words we use to describe graphs when numbers are increasing or decreasing. Those are usually paired with certain adverbs depending on the flow of the graph. In addition, we also talked about expressing large numbers with different currencies and the differences between using American English versus British English. Hopefully, you're able to use this information soon and you continue to practice the new words you learned today. Thank you for watching English for Business and Economics. See you next time.
