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.