听力文本如下:
Welcome to ESLPod.com's “Business Meetings" course: lesson four.
I'm your host, Dr. Jeff McQuillan, from the Center for Educational Development in beautiful Los Angeles, California.
In the third lesson of “Business Meetings,” we learned business vocabulary for beginning a presentation and letting people know what will be discussed in formal and informal business meetings.
In this fourth lesson, we're going to learn vocabulary for actually giving a presentation.
Let's start by listening to Shawn's presentation at the formal meeting.
As I mentioned, our market share has been sliding for the past year.
Naturally, Vision Corporation is alarmed by these changes and wants to understand the underlying reasons.
The truth is, we're not entirely sure why we're losing market share, but we have identified three factors that may contribute to the cause: a growing number of competitors, our product's features, and poor advertising.
First, the number of competitors in our industry has doubled in the past year.
To counter this, we must learn to differentiate Vision Corporation from the other companies.
Second, our product lacks some of the features that customers are looking for.
We need to improve our product and make it the best market offering.
Third, our advertising has been ineffective in reaching our potential customers.
We need to rethink our marketing campaigns and make sure that we're targeting the right market.
Now I'm going to turn things over to Ms. Graff, who will discuss the findings of her focus groups.
Shawn begins by saying, “As I mentioned, our market share has been sliding.”
The phrase “as I mentioned” is used to refer back to something that was said earlier.
In this case, Shawn has already said that market share was sliding, or falling, when he began the presentation.
He says “as I mentioned” to remind people of this.
I could say, “As I mentioned, this lesson is about making a presentation” - I already told you that; I'm reminding you that I told you that already - “as I mentioned.”