Business Idioms 20 Review

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Take a look back

Image Credit
Srikaanth Sekar via Wikimedia

This lesson will look back on the previous four lessons. You will get a chance to remember and use idioms you have learned.

Introduction

Recall the language you learned in previous lessons. What was your favourite idiom from each lesson? Have you had a chance to use it?

Your teacher will help you to remember idioms from each unit.

  • Work
  • Problems, difficulty or misfortune
  • Ease
  • Ability
Practice

A. Real-world examples

For each short passage below, do the following: 

  • Read the passage and predict the idiom.
  • Listen to the audio, identify the idiom and compare it to your prediction.
  • Explain in your own words what it means.

Note: don't worry about grasping the full context; just focus on the idiom being used.

1. A CEO is giving a presentation on Thursday.
"All right, you made a mistake, ______. We're gonna learn from that..."

2. An actor wonders if the Q&A session is over.
"Anything else, or should we, um, ________ ?"

3. A reporter tells the an airline's trouble.
"the political crisis in Hong Kong was a major blow to Cathay Pacific. Now the impact of the Coronavirus may be _______."

4. A student talks about moving to the USA.
"I lived and worked in nine different countries in my life, so I thought coming here to the United States as a student would be ______."

5. A YouTube host presents a list of rich people who lost their fortune.
"Burton also owes the IRS more than $6 million. The classic lesson here is don't ___________."

6. A young inventor describes the process of creating medical device.
"I didn't have a whole lot of money, so I really had to ___________ for a lot of things."

7. Former U.S. president Barack Obama speaks at a Business Roundtable.
"But that's the status quo now. And if you want to correct those things, we've got to ___________."

8. The president and CEO of Harper Collins talks about the economics of publishing.
"...there's a lot of ideas like that, that we think we need to ___________, try things, and we're getting great results."

B. Discussion 

Now, try using an idiom to answer the following questions.

  1. What's the most difficult part of your job? 
  2. What's a bad thing that's happened in the last few months?
  3. What's something you consider very easy?
  4. What's something you are good at doing?