WISH + PAST SIMPLE or WISH + WOULD

WISH + PAST SIMPLE or WISH + WOULD » online exam

STRUCTURES AFTER 'WISH'

STRUCTURES AFTER WISH » ProProfs Quizzes

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Starbucks Gets the Square

Square Chief Executive, Jack Dorsey and Starbucks Chief Executive Howard Schultz come together to bring Square's innovative payment system across the country and put the customer first.

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Learning English - 6 Minute English - A Peruvian 'hero'

Learning English - 6 Minute English - A Peruvian 'hero' >

The HBR Channel: Why Everyone at Your Company Should Speak (A Little) English

 
Podcast Transcript
SG:Hi I’m Sarah Green. I’m here today with Harvard Business School Professor Tsedal Neely. Thanks so much for coming in.
TN: Thanks for having me.
SG: You’ve made the case that companies should have a common language. What’s the benefit for companies of having a common language?
TN: Well, companies need a language strategy, especially if they have any type of global aspirations. When you have an employee base that’s spread across the world, across geographies, across national boundaries, you need to find a way to get them to communicate and how do you do that if you don’t have some form of a language strategy or a common language? And what’s happening too today is that companies are very quickly starting to adopt English as a common language or a lingua franca is the term as well and they’re doing that in order to serve customers, in order to have better partner relationships and their competitors are doing it as well.
SG: You made the case that English should be that lingua franca. Why English and not say, a language like Mandarin?
TN: It’s a great question. I’m not the one who is selecting the choice for a common language. English is actually a common language of business today and so when I talk about language strategies oftentimes interchangeable with the English language. And the question of Mandarin comes out often. People think, you know, China is rising and will it one day take over in the language choice? And I argue that for now it won’t, because English has some advantages that for example Mandarin doesn’t. The English language has had a massive head start and be imbedded around the world through the colonial history of the British and the American spread of its culture. Mandarin, on the other hand, you have less people around the world who are not from that region who speak it, and the second thing is that it’s much more difficult, it’s easier for people to speak broken English than it is broken Mandarin.
SG: That’s a really good point. So when companies are deciding whether they need a language strategy like that? Do they need to, do all companies need one or just multinationals? What if a company is only based in the US?
TN: The companies with a global strategy need a language strategy, anytime you’re extending beyond your domestic place and you’re interacting with people with different language backgrounds then you need a language strategy. If a company is focused domestically only, it becomes less important but what I’m finding is, customers are getting spread around the world.
SG: Let’s talk a little bit about some of the implementation challenges with the language strategy. It seems like the kind of thing that could rub people the wrong way, if they have a strong sense of cultural identity and you’re asking them to learn another language for their job that seems like a sensitive issue.
TN: That’s exactly right. One of the reasons I argue in this article is that companies need to be very thoughtful in not only determining their language strategy but also implementing it, is because this is one of the toughest most radical things a company can ask their employees: to change a language but I’ve developed an adoption framework that caters to the needs of employees so that they don’t feel that their identities are being water down but instead they’re gaining a new skill that enhances their personal as well as their professional advancement. When you select an English language strategy, you’re feeling to work hard to make sure that your native speakers, American, your speakers from the UK, your speakers from Australia begin to communicate in ways that accommodate others so language strategies are also about insuring that everyone is involved in building up the linguistic capacity of a company. Native speakers have a big role to play.
SG: Could you just tell us a little bit about what you mean by how native speakers can help in that way?
TN: For one, native speakers can’t show up in a mixed language environment or mixed language skilled environment and speak as they do among themselves. They need to slow down, they need to use different vocabulary to accommodate others, they need to help their coworkers to communicate better, they literally have to change their communication behaviors in order to accommodate non-native speakers but what you find oftentimes is that native speakers continue on business as usual and that doesn’t work so they need to dial down while non-native speakers dial up and managers actually have to fully manage the processes of communication when you have people of all levels of fluency interacting in a common language.
SG: Well Tsedal, thanks so much for talking with us today about this.
TN: Thank you.

Quiz 0001: 'WHETHER OR NOT' and 'EVEN IF'

Quiz 0001: WHETHER OR NOT and EVEN IF » create exam

The Bilingual Brain Is Sharper and More Focused, Study Says - Health Blog - WSJ

April 30, 2012, 5:01 PM ET From The Wall Street Journal

The ability to speak two languages can make bilingual people better able to pay attention than those who can only speak one language, a new study suggests.

Scientists have long suspected that some enhanced mental abilities might be tied to structural differences in brain networks shaped by learning more than one language, just as a musician’s brain can be altered by the long hours of practice needed to master an instrument.

Now, in a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers at Northwestern University for the first time have documented differences in how the bilingual brain processes the sounds of speech, compared with those who speak a single language, in ways that make it better at picking out a spoken syllable, even when it is buried in a babble of voices.

That biological difference in the auditory nervous system appears to also enhance attention and working memory among those who speak more than one language, they say.

“Because you have two languages going on in your head, you become very good at determining what is and is not relevant,” says Dr. Nina Kraus, a professor of neurobiology and physiology at Northwestern, who was part of the study team. “You are a mental juggler.”

In the new study, Kraus and her colleagues tested the involuntary neural responses to speech sounds by comparing brain signals in 23 high school students who were fluent in English and Spanish to those of 25 teenagers who only spoke English. When it was quiet, both groups could hear the test syllable — “da” — with no trouble, but when there was background noise, the brains of the bilingual students were significantly better at detecting the fundamental frequency of speech sounds.

“We have determined that the nervous system of a bilingual person responds to sound in a way that is distinctive from a person who speaks only one language,” Kraus says.

Through this fine-tuning of the nervous system, people who can master more than one language are building a more resilient brain, one more proficient at multitasking, setting priorities, and, perhaps, better able to withstand the ravages of age, a range of recent studies suggest.

Indeed, some preliminary research suggests that people who speak a second language may have enhanced defenses against the onset of dementia and delay Alzheimer’s disease by an average of four years, as WSJ reported in 2010.

The ability to speak more than one language also may help protect memory, researchers from the Center for Health Studies in Luxembourg reported at last year.

After studying older people who spoke multiple languages, they concluded that the more languages someone could speak, the better: People who spoke three languages were three times less likely to have cognitive problems compared to bilingual people. Those who spoke four or more languages were five times less likely to develop cognitive problems.

Not so long ago, people worried that children who grew up learning two languages at once were at a developmental disadvantage compared with those who focused on only one.

New research suggests that even babies have little trouble developing bilingual skills.

Researchers at the University of British Columbia’s Infant Studies Centre reported that babies being raised in a bilingual family show from birth a preference for each of the native languages they heard while still in the womb and can readily distinguish between them.

Moreover, bilingual infants appear to learn the grammars of their two languages as well as babies learning a single language, even when the two languages are as different from one another as English and Japanese, or English and Punjabi.

BEN 13 – The Euro Crisis

Business English News.

BEN 13 – The Euro Crisis

The rather dangerous Monsieur Hollande

The Socialist who is likely to be the next French president would be bad for his country and Europe

Apr 28th 2012 | from economist.com 

IT IS half of the Franco-German motor that drives the European Union. It has been the swing country in the euro crisis, poised between a prudent north and spendthrift south, and between creditors and debtors. And it is big. If France were the next euro-zone country to get into trouble, the single currency’s very survival would be in doubt.

That is why the likely victory of the Socialist candidate, François Hollande, in France’s presidential election matters so much. In the first round on April 22nd Mr Hollande came only just ahead of the incumbent, Nicolas Sarkozy. Yet he should win the second round on May 6th, because he will hoover up all of the far-left vote that went to Jean-Luc Mélenchon and others and also win a sizeable chunk from the National Front’s Marine Le Pen and the centrist François Bayrou.

Mr Sarkozy has a mountain to climb. Many French voters seem viscerally to dislike him. Neither Ms Le Pen (who, disturbingly, did well) nor Mr Bayrou (who, regrettably, did not) is likely to endorse him, as both will gain from his defeat. So, barring a shock, such as an implosion in next week’s televised debate, Mr Hollande can be confident of winning in May, and then of seeing his party triumph in June’s legislative election.

This newspaper endorsed Mr Sarkozy in 2007, when he bravely told French voters that they had no alternative but to change. He was unlucky to be hit by the global economic crisis a year later. He has also chalked up some achievements: softening the Socialists’ 35-hour week, freeing universities, raising the retirement age. Yet Mr Sarkozy’s policies have proved as unpredictable and unreliable as the man himself. The protectionist, anti-immigrant and increasingly anti-European tone he has recently adopted may be meant for National Front voters, but he seems to believe too much of it. For all that, if we had a vote on May 6th, we would give it to Mr Sarkozy—but not on his merits, so much as to keep out Mr Hollande.

With a Socialist president, France would get one big thing right. Mr Hollande opposes the harsh German-enforced fiscal tightening which is strangling the euro zone’s chances of recovery. But he is doing this for the wrong reasons—and he looks likely to get so much else wrong that the prosperity of France (and the euro zone) would be at risk.

A Socialist from the left bank

Although you would never know it from the platforms the candidates campaigned on, France desperately needs reform. Public debt is high and rising, the government has not run a surplus in over 35 years, the banks are undercapitalised, unemployment is persistent and corrosive and, at 56% of GDP, the French state is the biggest of any euro country.

Mr Hollande’s programme seems a very poor answer to all this—especially given that France’s neighbours have been undergoing genuine reforms. He talks a lot about social justice, but barely at all about the need to create wealth. Although he pledges to cut the budget deficit, he plans to do so by raising taxes, not cutting spending. Mr Hollande has promised to hire 60,000 new teachers. By his own calculations, his proposals would splurge an extra €20 billion over five years. The state would grow even bigger.

Optimists retort that compared with the French Socialist Party, Mr Hollande is a moderate who worked with both François Mitterrand, the only previous French Socialist president in the Fifth Republic, and Jacques Delors, Mitterrand’s finance minister before he became president of the European Commission. He led the party during the 1997-2002 premiership of Lionel Jospin, who was often more reformist than the Gaullist president, Jacques Chirac. They dismiss as symbolic Mr Hollande’s flashy promises to impose a 75% top income-tax rate and to reverse Mr Sarkozy’s rise in the pension age from 60 to 62, arguing that the 75% would affect almost nobody and the pension rollback would benefit very few. They see a pragmatist who will be corralled into good behaviour by Germany and by investors worried about France’s creditworthiness.

If so, no one would be happier than this newspaper. But it seems very optimistic to presume that somehow, despite what he has said, despite even what he intends, Mr Hollande will end up doing the right thing. Mr Hollande evinces a deep anti-business attitude. He will also be hamstrung by his own unreformed Socialist Party and steered by an electorate that has not yet heard the case for reform, least of all from him. Nothing in the past few months, or in his long career as a party fixer, suggests that Mr Hollande is brave enough to rip up his manifesto and change France (see article). And France is in a much more fragile state than when Mitterand conducted his Socialist experiment in 1981-83. This time the response of the markets could be brutal—and hurt France’s neighbours too.

Goodbye to Berlin

What about the rest of Europe? Here Mr Hollande’s refusal to countenance any form of spending cut has had one fortunate short-term consequence: he wisely wants to recast the euro zone’s “fiscal compact” so that it not only constrains government deficits and public debt, but also promotes growth. This echoes a chorus of complaint against German-inspired austerity now rising across the continent, from Ireland and the Netherlands to Italy and Spain (see Charlemagne).

The trouble is that unlike, say, Italy’s Mario Monti, Mr Hollande’s objection to the compact is not just about such macroeconomic niceties as the pace of fiscal tightening. It is chiefly resistance to change and a determination to preserve the French social model at all costs. Mr Hollande is not suggesting slower fiscal adjustment to smooth the path of reform: he is proposing not to reform at all. No wonder Germany’s Angela Merkel said she would campaign against him.

Every German chancellor eventually learns to tame the president next door, and Mr Hollande would be a less mercurial partner than Mr Sarkozy. But his refusal to countenance structural reform of any sort would surely make it harder for him to persuade Mrs Merkel to tolerate more inflation or consider some form of debt mutualisation. Why should German voters accept unpalatable medicine when France’s won’t?

A rupture between France and Germany would come at a dangerous time. Until recently, voters in the euro zone seemed to have accepted the idea of austerity and reform. Technocratic prime ministers in Greece and Italy have been popular; voters in Spain, Portugal and Ireland have elected reforming governments. But nearly one in three French voters cast their first-round ballots for Ms Le Pen and Mr Mélenchon, running on anti-euro and anti-globalisation platforms. And now Geert Wilders, a far-right populist, has brought down the Dutch government over budget cuts. Although in principle the Dutch still favour austerity, in practice they have not yet been able to agree on how to do it (see article). And these revolts are now being echoed in Spain and Italy.

It is conceivable that President Hollande might tip the balance in favour of a little less austerity now. Equally, he may scare the Germans in the opposite direction. Either way one thing seems certain: a French president so hostile to change would undermine Europe’s willingness to pursue the painful reforms it must eventually embrace for the euro to survive. That makes him a rather dangerous man.