Business news

Listen to the business news to practise and improve your listening skills.

Do the preparation task first. Then listen to the audio and do the exercises.

Preparation

Transcript

The first item in the news today is the recent elections that took place across the country. This was a crucial vote, which may see a dramatic change in how the country develops over the coming years. Overall, a 54.5 per cent voter turnout was registered. This represents an increase of 11 per cent over the previous election and six per cent above the average for the past 50 years. There has also been a slight change in demographics, with an increase in youth turnout in the 18- to 24- and 24- to 29-year-old brackets. Despite this increase, young people are still less likely to vote than older people; 84 per cent of voters in the 70 plus age group came to the polling stations.

Moving on, the global digital powerhouse ONK today posted quarterly results which were above forecast. Back in March, Tim Bolling, CEO, issued a profit warning over fears that there would be losses following the recall of their leading product, the 40d device. In fact, the company posted quarterly revenue of US$14.8 billion which represents an increase of 11 per cent from the same quarter a year ago. They also announced that they had sold 21 million 40d devices over the quarter. The company has provided the information that with this level of revenue, there will be a gross margin of 34 to 35 per cent, ultimately leading to a US$1.20 per share cash dividend awarded to shareholders.

And in our final news item we ask, will we soon be saying goodbye to coins and notes forever? The nationwide trend of using cashless payment options is increasing. There are a number of reasons for this development. A key reason for this is a growing interest in reducing the number of items people need to leave their homes with. As almost everyone carries a smartphone with them, and many people also have smartwatches, the ability to pay for things using one of these two technologies is particularly appealing. More and more retailers are accepting cashless payments and in some cases they've stopped accepting cash altogether.

Task 1

Exercise

Task 2

Exercise

Discussion

Write a short overview of statistics, figures or trends that you are familiar with.

Download

Worksheet87.93 KB

Try another listening

Language level

B2 Upper intermediate

Speaking of Apple, 2019 sales were reported for the second fiscal quarter and the data was as follows: - Revenue between $55 billion and $59 billion - Gross margin between 37% and 38% - Operational expenditure between 8.5 and 8.6 billion dollars - Other income/(expenditure) of $300 million - Tax rate of approximately 17%. Without a doubt the company has had better years of sales. In spite of its new strategies it has not seen a real drop.

The municipal president of Chignahuapan, Puebla has implemented health measures, such as reducing the audience capacity to 33 percent, so that the Festival of Light and Life is held in the municipality. This will make the tourist visits are reduced and therefore also the municipal economy.

A very important topic is aporophobia, this concept is "new" (it’s a little known topic) even though it has been practiced for decades. But what is aporophobia? This is the fear or contempt for poor people. It is a very recurrent theme in migration, more than 80 percent of migrants suffer from it. It is a negative factor that affects millions of individuals, its practice has increased in recent years and not much is done about it in Mexico and around the world

Statistics is a science, which with data, figures and numbers seeks to solve problems. I have used it for deep research. I have seen in the last semester its function and its application. It is applied in areas such as economics, politics, the arts, health, and more. we can got the data from surveys, experiments, etc.

with the "de la huerta-lamont" protocol, mexico under president porfirio díaz, the mexican railroads were restored, but the debt accumulated since 1907 is 242 million dorales.

AMLO's economic policy President Andrés Manuel López Obrador presented "the new economic policy in the coronavirus times"where it is mentioned that the fall of the neoliberal model was provoked by the COVID-19 pandemic which is why you think create a new model that is based five principles that are related;democracy, justice, honesty, austerity and well-being, each of these principles were defined.In order to boost this growth, it is necessary to strengthen microeconomics as it is very important for that money base to exist the State must comply with promoting development so that there are projects driven by himself.

In my country, the increase in femicides is increasing, each time more cases of murders of women are heard in the news, in 2020 it increased by 7.7%. From January to June of this year there have been 489 femicides, 7 to 10 women are murdered per day. These numbers are too sad ):

I will talk about violance against women in Mexico, numeric data of this year are awesome. According with the secretary of public security, between January and April of 2020 recording 33,240 crimes against women, He said that 58% are for malicious injuries, other 16% culpable injuries and finally 3% crimes against women´s life and integrity. It´s important to say that to have a increase feminicides when the quarantine start. Mexico has one of the higuest feminicide rates in the world. This social problem has been recurrent problem in the life of mexican families, and the fault accion for erradicate this promblem on the part of the goverment is a serious problem

U.S. military spending increased this year for the first time since 2010. The Donald Trump Administration increased investment in Defense by 4.6% over the previous years to USD $649 billion , 36% of the world total, which grew to an all time high. Washington and its strategic rival Beijing add for the first time more than half of the global investment in Defense, according to the data published by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).

The Internal forced displacements in Syria has been approximately 41 million in 2016, and it is estimated that there have been 25.4 million refugees in the same year, the conditions for this civil war are inhumane, in 2016 there has been approximately 370,000 deads and 95,000 missings . The conflict is so severe and complicated that it is doubtful to find solutions, and foreign intervention and of terrorist groups only makes the problem bigger.