common abbreviations in dictionaries

Here are a couple of common abbreviations that you will see in dictionaries:

• sb – somebody e.g. “send sb an email” = “send somebody an email”
• sth – something e.g. “send sth to you” = “send something to you”

related verbs and nouns

Here is a table of the common verbs / noun pairs that appear in exercise 4 on page 99 of the textbook.

Noun and verb pairs that are spelled the same (they are called homographs) often have different pronunciations:

• The noun usually has the primary stress (strong accent) on the first syllable and secondary stress (sometimes weak stress) on the second syllable.
• The verb usually has the primary stress on the second syllable and weak stress on the first syllable.

This is often tricky to hear and we listened to some examples to see if we could distinguish them. If you want to listen again it is CD2 track 27.

Three sayings you might hear

Here are three sayings in English which you might hear and are connected to animals:

• Many ways to skin a cat = “Many ways to do something”
• Let the cat out of the bag = “telling someone a secret that is to your detriment”
• Buy a pig in a poke = “buy without checking”

Reading some business news

We read a news report from the BBC Business news – I selected this item as it was:

• about Germany
• had good news in it
• the grammar and vocabulary were largely known to you

Here is the article:

Overseas trade drives German economic growth

Germany’s economic growth in the final three months of last year was largely driven by overseas trade, according to official statistics.

The German economy grew by 0.4% in the quarter compared with the third quarter, the German statistics agency said, confirming its earlier estimate.

Foreign trade drove the increase, accounting for 1.1 percentage points of the rise in gross domestic product.

However, weak domestic demand cut 0.7 percentage points from the figure.

The balance of exports and imports was the “key economic engine in the period”, the statistics office said.

Despite the weak domestic demand at the end of last year, economists said they now expected it to pick up.

“High job security and rising incomes as well as very low inflation have been boosting consumer confidence to record highs lately and should translate into stronger household spending growth in 2014,” said Christian Schulz at Berenberg Bank.

The performance of the German economy has weakened over the past two years, and for 2013 as a whole it grew by just 0.4% – marking its slowest expansion since the start of the global financial crisis in 2008.

The official figures also showed that Germany’s GDP in the fourth quarter of 2013 was up 1.3% on the same period a year earlier.

Here is a link to the PDF of this text

I plan to make more links to business news articles as we go on in the course.