Visual displays like charts, graphs etc... form an important part of business presentations. They are very useful for displaying data in an understandable form for the audience. But simply showing charts or graphs in powerpoint in a business presentation isn't enough, you need to be able to describe them and explain their significance to the audience.
In this online exercise on presentations, you will learn and remember useful English words and phrases that are used to both explain and describe charts and graphs professionally in a presentation. In addition, you will learn phrases to emphasize points and examples in English.
To improve your vocabulary for explaining data, trends and statistics, do some of our online exercises on talking about numbers and figures.
Click here to see more of our online exercises on presentations and presentation vocabulary
Read the following part of a business presentation (on improving staff performance) where the person doing the presentation is describing a chart.
From the context, try to guess what the meaning of the words/phrases in bold are and why they are being said. Then do the quiz at the end to check if you are right.
Speaker:'Let me start the first part of the presentation, with an overview of current employee under-performance. But what does employee under-performance mean? Basically, employees don't do what they are capable of, with the time and resources available.
Allow me to demonstrate this by showing you a Bar Chart. This is a bar chart from a well-known multinational retail company. It shows that over a ten-year period, between 1998 and 2008, that their relative labour cost for each product they sold increased every year. Over the ten years, that meant a 15% increase.
Now, lets ask ourselves why this happened? Did the number of staff increase? Yes, it did up to 2006! Did wages increase higher than inflation? No they didn't! Did other costs fall? Yes they did. So while there were efficiency savings in other areas of the business, like in Information Technology etc..., labour was becoming relatively more expensive.
This isn't a one-off case. This next graph demonstrates that this is a trend affecting all companies. It shows the average staff costs as a percentage of total costs over the last 5 years for the top 100 companies in the UK. The average staff costs is represented by the red line, while the dotted blue line shows overall costs.
As you can see, whilst overall costs fell by roughly 15% over the last 5 years, the actual average staff costs as a percentage of overall costs increased by over 10% over the same period. And this is just an average, in some cases it increased by almost 15%.
I think that you can agree that this is unsustainable. Companies cannot be competitive in the long-term whilst their staff are becoming increasing inefficient and relatively more expensive.
Let me illustrate this with an example. You all remember the American company Samson & Heat? They went bankrupt this July. What do you think the fundamental reason was? Falling sales? Maybe it contributed, but other companies faced similar problems and are still here today! Their fundamental problem was that their overall relative staff costs had risen by just under 30% in the last 10 years, over inflation. To put it is simply, they were out-priced by their competitors.'
Match the words/phrases in bold from the above text to each of the definitions/descriptions below. Click on the "Check" button at the bottom of the quiz to check your answers.
When the answer is correct, two icons will appear below the answer. The "" icon contains extra information on the word/phrase. In the "" icon, you can listen to the pronunciation of the word/phrase.
Now that you understand the meaning of the words/phrases and when to use them, practise using them by creating your own sentences with them in English. Also click on the "" icon under each correct answer and listen how each is pronounced correctly.
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