Content Focus. Task 1. Hand in your milestone lists of the Ukrainian publishing companies and your reports from Student’s Book and Workbook.

Task 1. Hand in your milestone lists of the Ukrainian publishing companies and your reports from Student’s Book and Workbook.

 

Task 2. Now your teacher will hand out the organisational structure chart descriptions written by you as a home assignment for the previous lesson, checked and commented on. After you look through the comments made by the teacher on your organisational structure chart descriptions, ask him/her questions if you do not quite understand or have doubts about some comments.

 

Task 3. Open your workbook Unit 1 in order to check tasks 1-6.

Task 4. When you read texts, articles about financial matters, you meet a lot of financial terms. Understanding of these financial terms is very important for understanding of the whole text. Read the sentences with financial terms and their definitions given below. You may look up their meanings in the dictionary if necessary (You have 10 minutes for this task).

Example	Meaning
We need to raise capital.	capital is the money you need to start, a business (to raise capital is to find the money you need).
The company has an annual turnover of $20 million.	turnover is the total value of goods or services that a company sells in a particular period of lime (annual = every year), synonym – sales revenue.
Operating costs have gone up this year.	operating costs – the amount of money that a business needs to spend to continue as a business.
Inflation is now at 3 per cent.	inflation is a general rise in the price of services and goods in a particular country.
We paid £1 million in tax.	tax is money you have to pay to the government.
The company made a pre-tax profit of £2 million.	profit is the money yon make in a business after paying costs. Antonym is a loss.
I think the company has cash flow problems.	cash flow is the movement of money into and out of a business (a cash flow problem means more money is going out than coming in).
I need a bank loan. They took out a loan.	bank loan is the money the bank lends and somebody borrows.
We pay a lot of interest. The interest rate is 4 per cent.	interest is extra money you pay when you borrow money (the interest rate is the exact cost of borrowing).

(The text is borrowed and modified from “Oxford Word Skills” (Intermediate) by Ruth Gairns, Stuard Redman: as of 23 September 2011)

Task 5. Match 1-8 with a-i (You have 5 minutes for this task).

1. annual	a) a loan
2. operating	b) revenue
3. pay	c) rate
4. raise	d) a profit
5. interest	e) costs
6. takeout	f) turnover
7. sales	g) capital
8. make	h) flow
9. cash	i) 10% interest

 

Task 6. Read the text below and explain the meanings of the underlined words (You have 10 minutes for the whole task till 5 minutes brake).

Publishing as a Business

Derided in the 1911 Encyclopaedia Britannica as "a purely commercial affair" that cared more about profits than about literary quality, publishing is fundamentally a business, with a need for the expenses of creating, producing, and distributing a book or other publication not to exceed the income derived from its sale.

The publisher usually controls the advertising and other marketing tasks, but may subcontract various aspects of the process to specialist publisher marketing agencies. In many companies, editing, proofreading, layout, design and other aspects of the production process are done by freelancers.

Dedicated in-house salespeople are sometimes replaced by companies who specialize in sales to bookshops, wholesalers and chain stores for a fee. This trend is accelerating as retail book chains and supermarkets have centralized their buying.

If the entire process up to the stage of printing is handled by an outside company or individuals, and then sold to the publishing company, it is known as book packaging. This is a common strategy between smaller publishers in different territorial markets where the company that first buys the intellectual property rights then sells a package to other publishers and gains an immediate return on capital invested. Indeed, the first publisher will often print sufficient copies for all markets and thereby get the maximum quantity efficiency on the print run for all.

Some businesses maximize their profit margins through vertical integration; book publishing is not one of them. Although newspaper and magazine companies still often own printing presses and binderies, book publishers rarely do. Similarly, the trade usually sells the finished products through a distributor who stores and distributes the publisher's wares for a percentage fee or sells on a sale or return basis.

Book clubs are almost entirely direct-to-retail, and niche publishers pursue a mixed strategy to sell through all available outlets — their output is insignificant to the major booksellers, so lost revenue poses no threat to the traditional symbiotic relationships between the four activities of printing, publishing, distribution and retail.

(The text is borrowed and modified from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishing#Publishing_as_a_business: as of 23 September 2011)

 

Task 7. Look through the text “Publishing as a Business” (Task 6) once more, answer the following questions (You have 5 minutes for this task):

1. According to the author of the article is publishing a business or an art?

2. What is freelancers’ job in many publishing companies?

3. Dedicated in-house salespeople are never replaced by companies who specialize in sales to bookshops, wholesalers and chain stores for a fee, aren’t they?

4. Have retail book chains and supermarkets centralized their buying?

5. How do publishing companies sell the finished products?

 

Task 8. Financial trends. Financial trends reflect the changes (ups and downs) in the rates and prices of financial products traded in the financial markets. Look through the table below. You can find verbs and nouns which are used to describe financial trends as well as the sample sentences in which they are used in this table. You can find the meanings of unknown words in the dictionary (You have 10 minutes for this task):

 

Trend	Common verbs + examples	Common nouns + examples
	go up, rise, increase, grow Prices have risen by 10 per cent.	rise, increase, growth We saw some growth last year.
	go down, fall, drop, decrease, decline Interest rates fell last month.	fall, drop, decrease, decline, reduction There's been a dropinsales
	remain unchanged/stable Prices have remained unchanged.	stability There has been stability in the markets
	peak Sales peakedin September.	peak Sales reached a peak in 2007.
	fluctuate Sales have fluctuatedall year.	fluctuation There, has been some fluctuation in prices.

(The text is borrowed and modified from “Oxford Word Skills” (Intermediate) by Ruth Gairns, Stuart Redman: as of 23 September 2011)

 

Task 9. Match the adjectives which are used to describe financial trends with their meanings (You have 5 minutes for this task).

Adjective	Meaning
1. a slight rise in costs	a) noticeable and important
2. a gradual rise in profits	b) very large and sudden
3. a steady increase in the interest rate	c) slow and over a long period of time.
4. a significant fall in profits	d) very small
5. a sharp fall in sales	e) slow but regular and continuing

 

Task 10. Complete the sentences on the right. The meaning must stay the same. The first one is done for you as an example (You have 5 minutes for this task).

1. There has been a sharp fall in sales.	Sales have fallen sharply.
2. There has been a steady rise in sales.	Sales have……..
3. There was significant growth in sales.	Sales…….
4. There was a gradual rise in the price.	The price…..
5. There was a slight fall in profits.	Profits…..
6. There has been stability in costs.	Costs have remained…..

 

Task 11. Case study. Work in pairs of three or four. Below you can see the graph that shows the number of printed books from 2005 till 2011 of a publishing house. Your task is to describe this graph. You have 7 minutes to discuss and write the description in groups. Present the description in front of the class. Do not be afraid to make some conclusions about the company activities judging from the graph.