English for Economics

Session 9 – 9 May 2008

Review: this+summary word; Economist vocabulary, social conversations, pausing
Features of academic writing: linking strategies

Listening and speaking: making a presentation interesting

Using linking for cohesion

(adapted from L. Hamp-Lyons, B. Heasley, Study Writing, CUP 2006)

Rewrite the following paragraphs to make them more cohesive and shorter.

Americans use more than one billion pounds of pesticides annually. They use the pesticides to combat pests on agricultural crops, in homes, businesses, schools, parks, hospitals, and other public places. The health effects of pesticides exposure range from mild to severe. The health effects may include: dizziness, nausea, acute poisoning, cancer, neurological effects, and reproductive and developmental harm. In many cases, the health effects are not immediate. The health effects may show up years later as an unexplained illness.

The number of cases of pesticide poisoning in the U.S. is alarming. The number in 1997 was 88,255 pesticide exposure emergencies. The pesticide emergencies were reported to the national network of Poison Control Centers. Fourteen fatalities were attributed to pesticide poisoning during the same period. Over 50 per cent of all reported pesticide poisoning cases involve children under six years of age. A 1998 study showed that children under six years of age exposed to pesticides often have impaired hand-eye coordination. They have decreased stamina and memory impairment. They showed difficulty when asked to draw a simple picture of a person. They showed this difficulty when compared to an unexposed peer.

Making a presentation interesting

You are going to listen to a 4 minute talk on the topic of globalisation.

First listening: make notes on the main points. Compare your notes with a partner.

Do you agree ?

Second listening: did you find any instances of the techniques used for making a presentation more interesting ?

Make notes and then compare with a partner. Listen again to check and add examples to your list.

Here are some exercises taken from the University of Birmingham’s English for International Students Unit’s Web page. There is a wealth of useful material developed from texts submitted by learners for language revision. If you have time, it is well worth checking out.

Cross-reference of relative pronouns

This Kibbitzer is based on the following sentence from a term paper by a Polish-speaking student of Computer Science (minor linguistic points not at issue corrected in the original). It complements Kibbitzer 19, which was about the cross-reference of pronouns (in particular, the pronoun 'it'): here we are concerned with the cross-reference of relative pronouns such as 'that' and 'which':

Original / Revision
Thus, it is an advantage to create the flow of functions for leaves of the tree hierarchy that allows the designer to analyse the dependencies between functions and thereby obtain a deeper understanding of the task. / Thus, it is an advantage to create the flow of functions for leaves of the tree hierarchy, a flow that allows the designer to analyse the dependencies between functions and thereby obtain a deeper understanding of the the task.

The problem here is that it may not be immediately clear to the reader whether the relative clause cross-refers to 'flow' or to 'hierarchy'. The suggested revision shows a way of making the cross-reference clearly.

The following citations show the same structure as the suggested revision: what is the noun from the preceding context to complete each one?

  1. Only a quiet and committed dialogue on a common problem, a ______that respects sovereignty and the pride of countries concerned, will offer any promise of success.
  2. We are talking about a different approach to the Divine, an ______that begins and ends in experience.
  3. It was crack cocaine that made the difference - not so much the drug itself as the world in which it is traded, a ______that is the creation of governments.
  4. Sir Iain told the Commons trade and industry select committee: ''Broadband could well form the pivot for the balance of economic success over the next century, a ______that could tilt one way or another."
  5. The government has been making disquieting noises about watering down proposals put forward last year by the pensions law review committee chaired by Professor Roy Goode, a ______that many believed did not go far enough.
  6. Charles had seen eating disorders in his own family (with his sisters Sarah and Diana's problems), a ______that could only be described as dysfunctional.

Sometimes the noun in this structure is not repeated from the preceding context, but is based on the meaning of the previous context. For example:

The workforce will be reduced by 4,000, a move that will lead to annual cost savings of $500 million.

Can you find nouns to complete the following citations?

  1. Julia Pollock is legal adviser to the Country Landowners' Association, an ______that represents more than 50,000 tenant farmers and local authorities.
  2. 27.9m mobile phones were shipped worldwide in 1994, a ______that is forecast to grow to 99.84m by 1999.
  3. He was appointed adviser to the Army in 1949, a ______that he was to hold until 1966 with a short three-year break.
  4. On returning to Iran in 1976, he was arrested for taking part in protests in Britain against the Shah, an ______that convinced him his future lay in Europe.
  5. Several European and north American companies are working on Computerised Face Recognition (CFR), a ______that can scan a crowd at 20 faces a second and match these images against a database of up to 1m photographs.
  6. The school mostly consists of `temporary' wooden classrooms now more than 60 years old. They are linked by a narrow, uneven, winding concrete corridor, a ______that becomes doubly dangerous when water leaks through the roof, as it regularly does.

Another useful way to improve you English is to do ‘clozes’. These are gap-filling exercises in which each 7th word has been omitted. It encourages you to use your language skills to find suitable words to fill the gaps. Make sure that you look carefully at the words before and after the gap, and use your knowledge of grammar and collocation to insert an appropriate word (there may be several correct alternatives).

AN EXPERIMENT ON RISKY CHOICE AMONGST HOUSEHOLDS

The expected utility-maximising household is ……….. of the most common models ………….. to understand economic behaviour. This standard ………….., which is used to investigate saving, …………….. decisions, labour supply etc., involves two …………….. assumptions. First, that the household acts ………… if it has a single set ………... preferences and, second, that these preferences …………….. to the axioms of expected utility ……………… The first of these assumptions has ……………….. scrutiny, but very little attention has been ...... to the second assumption for households ………….opposed to individuals. In fact though …………… is copious experimental evidence on how …………… choose, to date there has been …………….. little experimental investigation into how multi-adult ………………… or couples make their decisions. For ……………., in Starmer’s (2000) extended survey of the …………………….. of risky choice, there is no ……………….. of evidence on household as opposed ………… individual behaviour and though there is ……………interesting body of work by psychologists ……….. this issue, the questions asked provide …………….. insight in to the applicability of ………………… models of choice.

This paper therefore ………………….. results of an experiment to ……………. the following issue: to what extent …………….. the decisions made by couples ………….. the decisions made separately by individuals ………….. are part of a couple conform …………….. the standard model ? In outline the …………………. is as follows: we use a ……………….. of established couples and present them …………….. tasks of the kind depicted in ……………. 1, all of which involve binary …………….. between lotteries. In section 2 they………….. apart and must predict their partner’s …………………. from Section 1; in Section 3 they ………….. rejoin their partner and make choices …………. a couple. There is some overlap ………. the tasks faced in each section.