BEP 223 – Financial English: Discussing a Budget (1)

Welcome back to Business English Pod for today’s lesson on financial English vocabulary and discussing a budget.

Budgets aren’t just for accountants. Almost everyone in business has to talk about money and how to spend it. It doesn’t matter if you’re a manager with a million dollar budget or a field tech just tracking your expenses. You’ll be talking about money and budgets.

In fact, talk about budgets is everywhere. Turn on the news and it’s not hard to hear people discussing budget “cuts” or budget “reductions.” You can hear about governments with budget “deficits” and budget “surpluses.” Everyone’s worried about money, and in business, earning more often means spending less. These are the topics you’ll hear about today.

Before we listen, let’s talk a little about collocations. A collocation is a group of words that native speakers often use together. A correct collocation sounds natural, while an incorrect collocation sounds unnatural. For example, in English we say “budget cuts” to talk about lower spending. But we can’t say “budget slices” or “budget chops,” even though “slice” and “chop” mean “cut.” Those simply aren’t natural expressions.

You’ll hear many useful collocations in today’s dialog. As you listen, try to pick out these natural combinations of words. Then we’ll explain what they mean and how to use them in the debrief.

You’re going to hear a conversation between two managers in the IT department of a large company and their boss. Kate and Harry are the managers, and Linda is the boss. They’re discussing the past year’s budget and how they spent their department’s money.

Listening Questions

1. What does Linda want to examine first?
2. What does Harry say about the large one-time cost the department had?
3. According to Linda, what is finance concerned about?

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