Welcome back to Business English Pod for today’s lesson on analyzing trends during a presentation in English.

Business is a game of numbers. And whether you’re in marketing, finance, sales, or operations, you have different metrics that tell you whether you’re successful. Read any business report, and you’ll see these metrics presented in charts and graphs.

But charts and graphs aren’t enough on their own. Sure, you can use them to present a snapshot of the current state. And you can show how different numbers have gone up or down relative to other numbers. But so what? The numbers are only useful if we can analyze them, learn from them, and make better decisions with them.

When you analyze trends in a presentation, it’s a good idea to clearly state your approach from the beginning. Then you can do things like describe the rate of change and speculate about future developments. You might also make specific predictions about what will happen and raise people’s awareness of possible future trends.

In today’s dialog, we’ll rejoin a presentation at a mobile company called Ambient. A director named Pat has been presenting results for sales and market share. Now Pat is digging deeper and analyzing the company’s performance on one key metric: revenue per unit, or RPU.

Listening Questions

1. What is Pat going to compare in his approach to analyzing trends?
2. What does Pat predict about his company’s “RPU” in the future?
3. What possible future trend does Pat warn about at the end of the dialog?

Download: Podcast MP3>>> The post BEP 116c – Charts and Trends 3: Analyzing Trends first appeared on Business English Pod :: Learn Business English Online.

Welcome back to Business English Pod for today’s lesson on describing trends during a presentation in English.

Every great presentation has two things: good content and skilled delivery. These aren’t separate features. The content becomes good through skilled delivery. And skilled delivery means bringing the content alive, rather than just reading from a slide deck.

This marriage of content and delivery is especially important with charts and graphs. Many people know that visuals can enhance a presentation. But we’ve all had the experience of seeing a graph that’s so confusing that we come away feeling we know less, not more. So as a good presenter, you need to tell the graph’s story.

A graph’s story is all about change. Or lack of change. When we are presenting a graph, it’s always good to begin by introducing the theme, so people know what they’re looking at. Then we can bring people’s attention to specific parts of the graph. And we might describe how things are decreasing, staying the same, or increasing.

In today’s dialog, we’ll rejoin a presentation from Pat, a director with a mobile phone company called Ambient. Pat is giving a presentation to his sales team about market share. He’s talking about their own company as well as the competition, describing the trends in market share.

Listening Questions

1. What does Pat say is the theme of the chart that he’s showing?
2. Which company’s market share decreased in 2007?
3. What does Pat say about the market share of all the smaller competitors in recent quarters?

Download: Podcast MP3>>> The post BEP 115c – Charts and Trends 2: Describing Trends first appeared on Business English Pod :: Learn Business English Online.

In this Business English News lesson on data centers, we look at business English vocabulary related to energy supply and tech.

AI seemed relatively uncontroversial when it was limited to simple functions in your toothbrush or car. But then, in 2022, ChatGPT made an enormous splash, signaling the commercialization of generative AI. Since then, there’s been a rapid proliferation of new tools. And the popularity of these tools has necessitated massive infrastructure to support all this computing power.

The energy demand is huge. In 2024, U.S. data centers used 183 terawatt-hours of electricity – more than 4% of all U.S. power usage. A single large AI data center can use as much electricity as 100,000 homes in a year. Bigger ones under construction may use twenty times more. This growing demand puts pressure on local power grids and can lead to increased energy costs.

They also need large amounts of water to keep their machines cool, which can strain local water supplies. Yet companies are not required to fully report their energy or water use.

As concerns grow about higher bills, water shortages, and climate change, companies promise cleaner energy and better technology. Still, experts warn that AI’s energy use may grow faster than these improvements.

Download: Podcast MP3>>> The post Business English News 61 – Data Centers first appeared on Business English Pod :: Learn Business English Online.