Step by Step 3000 第1册 Unit8:Trends in Economics(3)

Part 3. Bulls and bears.

Keywords. stock exchange, brokers, companies, investors, value, the big board,

a bull market, a bear market, prices, profit, go belly up, windfall.

Vocabulary. broker, decrease, duck, dispute, belly, windfall.

A. Now you are going to hear a passage about some American expressions that are commonly used in business.

Listen carefully and explain in norm form the following words and expressions with the information you get from the story.

Today we tell about some American expressions that commonly used in business.

Bell sound, lighted messages appear, men and women work at computers, they talk on the telephone, at times they shout and run around, this noisy place is a stock exchange.

Here experts salespeople called brokers, buy and sell shares of companies.

The shares are known as stocks.

People who own stock in a company own part of that company.

People pay brokers to buy and sell stocks for them.

If a company earns money, its stock increases in value.

If the company does not earn money, this stock decrease in value.

Brokers and investors carefully watch for any changes on the big board.

That is the name given to a list of stocks sold on the New York Stock Exchange.

The first written use of the word with that meaning was in the newspaper in Illinois in 1837.

It said "the sales on the board were 1700 dollars in American gold."

Investors and brokers watch the big board to see if the stock market is a bull market or a bear market.

In a bear market, prices go down. In a bull market, prices go up.

Investors in a bear market promise to sell a stock in the future at a set price, but the investors does not own the stock yet.

He or she waits to buy it when the price ducks.

The meaning of a bear market is thought to come from an old story about a man who sold the skin of a bear before he caught the bear.

At English Dictionary of the 1600's said "to sell a bear is to sell what one has not."

Word experts dispute the beginning of the word "bull" in the stock market.

But some say it came from the long connection of the two animals "bulls" and "bears" in sports that were popular years ago in England.

Investors are always concerned about the possibility of a company falling.

In the modern world, a company that does not earn enough profit is said to go belly up.

A company that goes belly up dies like a fish.

Fish turn over on their backs when they die, so they're stomach or belly up.

Stock market investors do not want that to happen to a company, they want the company whose stock they own to earn more profit than expected.

This would sharply increase the value of the stock.

Investors are hoping for a windfall.

The word "windfall" comes from England of centuries ago, there poor people were banned from cutting trees in forests owned by rich landowners.

But if the wind blew down a tree, the poor person could take the wood for fuel.

So a windfall is something wonderful that happens unexpectedly.

B. Now listen to the passage again, then briefly answer the questions.