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Business Collocations - Page 2 of 5 - Business English Resources
- apply pressure
- break into a market
- chair a meeting
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English stuff, Kiwi stuff, Colombian stuff, lot´s of stuff
Tuesday, August 30, 2022
Daily bread 08/30/2022
Saturday, August 27, 2022
Daily bread 08/27/2022
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Can Robots Have Team Spirit? They Can Now - TechHQ
- multiple robots (or drones) conducting collaborative actions
- when those lines of communication are down, or unavailable,
- becomes clunky
- tight-margin, high-productivity business sectors
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Friday, August 26, 2022
Daily bread 08/26/2022
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Why we shouldn’t push a positive mindset on those in poverty | Psyche Ideas
- How do you improve your life?
- Believing in your power, staying focused on future goals, being proactive, and leveraging social relationships are four outlooks that can help, many of us suspect, in overcoming life’s obstacles.
- Yet such efforts have been largely unsuccessful at reducing poverty and unemployment, and have been derided both by the people they were designed to help and by those advocating on their behalf.
- in the 1950s and ’60s, it was argued that people caught in intergenerational poverty traps were morally deficient: they did not want to work hard to advance in society and would rather depend on the state for financial support
- In subsequent decades, efforts to encourage people to create a better life for themselves were focused on education and financial literacy
- More recently, research has focused on the psychological costs of poverty itself: thinking daily about financial worries eats up cognitive ‘bandwidth’, leaving little mental space for someone to figure out how to advance their long-term goals
- Despite decades of explanations and interventions, these efforts have fallen short in one important way: what I call the assumption of free-floating mindsets.
- It runs like this: everyone has the power to decide how to perceive and respond to the unavoidable constraints and challenges they face.
- believing in one’s own power reflects what researchers call an internal ‘locus of control’; sticking to long-term plans engages ‘self-regulation’; being positively proactive in moving toward one’s goals is called ‘approach orientation’; and leveraging relationships involves the development of ‘general social trust’ and ‘agreeableness’.
- There’s one problem: mindsets are not free-floating
- Instead, they are embedded in life conditions that have material, social and ideological dimensions, and this is just as true for those of us living in poverty as it is for the rest of us living in financial comfort.
- what appears to be a free-floating mindset is actually the product of societal forces working in subtle ways
- how does a person with a set of fundamental needs navigate an environment filled with threats, opportunities and constraints?
- For those who are poor or living on a very low income, one of the most salient aspects of one’s environment is scarcity
- resources can also be unstable over time: income one week is not predictive of earnings the following week
- Imagine for a moment what scarcity and instability might feel like
- You are constantly uncertain whether you will earn enough money (will your employer give you the hours you need this week?), while trying to avoid unexpected financial demands (will your child need a new school uniform, or will your car need repairs?). If you’re unable to pay rent, your family loses their home.
- Those assigned to be poor reported a lower sense of power, and outlooks assumed to be the product of a freely chosen mindset (self-efficacy and locus of control) were diminished by the mere momentary lived experience of trying to meet one’s needs when one does not have enough.
- It is a rational recalibration of a person’s sense of what their behaviour can actually achieve in response to ecological cues implying that there are bigger forces at play.
- A person’s locus of control can be seen as a barometer of their life conditions
- Think of the decision to stop smoking as an example. If your job exposes you to health risks (perhaps from shift work or toxins), or your attempts to find a new job yield little reward despite huge effort, or you start to notice that most people in your neighbourhood experience ill health as they age and die relatively young, why would you focus on giving up cigarettes?
- The potential future payoff from stopping smoking is simply not as great as the relief it gives from the chronic stress of your everyday life.
- To make it easier for people to adopt a mindset that unlocks flourishing, we should first ensure that their needs are met in a stable way, so they experience real control over their life circumstances and have a future that is worth investing in.
- Living on a low income often means living in a low-income neighbourhood in which your family is just one of many dealing with financial struggles.
- there are limits to what friends and family can do if they themselves are struggling to put food on the table
- can lead neighbours to feel they are competing for the resources needed to make ends meet.
- being poor in a rich country means that every encounter with those living in financial comfort, and every point of interaction with the welfare system, makes you even more conscious of your low socioeconomic standing
- Simply having a positive attitude won’t get you far when you combine the stress of scarcity and instability with the isolation of feeling that you and your community have been left behind by the rest of society
- A person in this situation is not mindlessly pessimistic and blind to opportunities to fulfil their aspirations; they’re regulating emotions and conserving their energies so that they don’t face continual disappointment or overlook very real threats.
- ‘We don’t plan long term because if we do we’ll just get our hearts broken. It’s best not to hope. You just take what you can get as you spot it.’
- The emerging picture is one of material adversity triggering social adversity, such that it is only wise to behave, and teach your children to behave, in ways that prevent you or them being exploited by a hostile world.
- the four components of a mindset that are claimed to enable flourishing – locus of control, self-regulation, approach orientation, and being trusting and agreeable – are not only less common in low-income contexts, they fit poorly to such contexts.
- Financial and social precarity keep a person solidly focused on dealing with threats of the here and now, such that ‘keeping an open mind’ and ‘thinking big’ become dangerous abstractions.
- Realising one’s personal freedom, adopting a positive outlook, focusing on achieving personal goals and using relationships to help you along the way are four components of a mindset
- Among those of middle or high socioeconomic status, we find this way of thinking predicts perfectionism, narcissism, Machiavellianism, stress, anxiety, and political disengagement.
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Tuesday, August 23, 2022
Monday, August 22, 2022
Daily bread 08/22/2022
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Quiet quitting is a trend taking over TikTok and possibly your workplace : NPR
- a misnomer
- Spending more time with
- the latest workplace trend
- carving out time to
- to go 'above and beyond,'
- it has been deemed
- hustle culture and burnout
- with newfound leverage
- a less rigid line
- to align more closely with
- the hang-ups about
- has afforded her the flexibility
- has gained traction
- to experience burnout
- an overwhelming trend of
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Friday, August 12, 2022
Tuesday, August 9, 2022
Monday, August 8, 2022
Thursday, August 4, 2022
Daily bread 08/04/2022
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IELTS Academic Reading description Paper format: Three reading passages with a variety of questions using a number of task types. Timing: 60 minutes - In Task 1, test takers are asked to describe some visual information (graph/table/chart/diagram) in their own words. They need to write 150 words in about 20 minutes. In Task 2, they respond to a point of view or argument or problem. They need to write 250 words in about 40 minutes.
- The recordings are heard only once.
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Test takers write their answers on the question paper as they listen and at the end of the test are given 10 minutes to transfer their answers to an answer sheet. Care should be taken when writing answers on the answer sheet as poor spelling and grammar are penalised. -
Fluency and coherence
This refers to the ability to talk with normal levels of continuity, rate and effort and to link ideas and language together to form coherent, connected speech. The key indicators of fluency are speech rate and speech continuity. The key indicators of coherence are logical sequencing of sentences, clear marking of stages in a discussion, narration or argument, and the use of cohesive devices (e.g. connectors, pronouns and conjunctions) within and between sentences.Lexical resource
This criterion refers to the range of vocabulary used and the precision with which meanings and attitudes can be expressed. The key indicators are the variety of words used, the adequacy and appropriacy of the words used and the ability to circumlocute (get round a vocabulary gap by using other words) with or without noticeable hesitation.Grammatical range and accuracy
This refers to the range and the accurate and appropriate use of the test takers' grammatical resource. The key indicators of grammatical range are the length and complexity of the spoken sentences, the appropriate use of subordinate clauses, and the range of sentence structures, especially to move elements around for information focus. The key indicators of grammatical accuracy are the number of grammatical errors in a given amount of speech and the communicative effect of error.Pronunciation
This criterion refers to the ability to produce comprehensible speech to fulfil the Speaking test requirements. The key indicators will be the amount of strain caused to the listener, the amount of the speech which is unintelligible and the noticeability of L1 influence. -
- Task achievement
- Coherence and cohesion
- Lexical resource
- Grammatical range and accuracy.
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Wednesday, August 3, 2022
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