Lesson 3 – Beginning a Presentation

Lesson 3 – Beginning a Presentation

Welcome to [bad word] s "Business Meetings" course: lesson two. I'm your host, Dr. Jeff McQuillan, coming to you from the Center for Educational Development in beautiful Los Angeles, California.

In the second lesson of "Business Meetings," we learned business vocabulary for introducing the participants at formal and informal business meetings. Now, in this third lesson, we're going to learn how to begin a presentation and let people know what's going to be discussed.

Let's begin by listening to the formal meeting.

Shawn: Thank you, Alex. And thank you to everyone who is here today. As you know, today's presentation is designed to present our recommendations about how Vision Corporation can increase its market share by reaching more of its potential market.

You should each have a copy of our handouts in front of you that correspond to the slides up here on the screen. This first slide shows our agenda for the day.

First, I will begin with an overview of how our market share has been declining during the past twelve months, and the reasons for that decline. Then, Ms. Graff will present the data that she gathered from the focus groups and her ideas for clarifying our target market. She will be followed by Mr. Hanson, who will discuss adapting our product to meet market needs, and he'll conclude with our main recommendations.

Since we have limited time today, please hold your questions until the end of the presentation.

Shawn begins by thanking the people for coming to hear his presentation. He says that "today's presentation is designed to present our recommendations." To be "designed" to do something means to be made or created for a specific purpose. The ESL Podcasts, for example, are designed to help you learn English. In this case, the presentation is designed to present recommendations. "recommendation" (recommendation) is a suggestion, an opinion, or advice about what someone should do. doctor's recommendation might be for you to stop smoking, or a teacher's recommendation might be for you to study more. Shawn's recommendations are "about how Vision Corporation can increase its market share by reaching more of its potential market," or the people who don't buy the product now, but might be interested in it. So, Shawn is going to make suggestions about how Vision Corporation can raise (or increase – make larger) its market share by reaching (or getting to) more of its potential market.

'Market share" is the percentage of sales that a company has in a specific market or a specific area or group of people. For example, Chinese companies have a large market share of the clothing sold in the United States – a lot of the clothing sold in the United States is made in China. So, Chinese companies have a large market share (a large percentage) of the clothes sold here. Companies want to increase their market share by getting more customers to buy their products, and that's what Shawn's presentation is about.

Shawn says that each person should have a copy of the "handouts" (handouts). "handout," is a piece of paper that is given to people in the audience (people who are listening to the presentation) during a presentation, so that they have more information. It's a piece of paper that has, usually, information related to the presentation that you give people who are listening. Having handouts means that you don't have to spend as much time writing down notes as you're listening, because the information is already there on a piece of paper.

Shawn says that the handouts "correspond to the slides…on the screen." To "correspond" to something means to match up with something or to be related to something. The amount of homework you have probably corresponds to the number of classes you're taking, meaning that if you take more classes you&