Lesson 5 – Giving a Presentation: Part (Visuals)

 [bad word] to [bad word] #39;s "Business Meetings" course: lesson five. I'm your host, Dr. Jeff [bad word] to you from the Center for Educational Development in beautiful Los Angeles, California.

In the fourth lesson of "Business Meetings," we learned some vocabulary for giving a presentation at formal and informal business meetings. In this fifth lesson, we're going to continue talking about how to give presentations, but this time we'll focus on using visuals, the images and pictures that help people understand what's being presented.

First, let's listen to Hannah's presentation at the formal meeting.

Hannah: Thank you, Mr. Edwards. We conducted eight focus groups, each with 10 to 12 people who currently use the product. In this pie chart, the yellow-shaded area represents those participants who buy the product from Vision Corporation, and [bad word] only 13% of the people we spoke with. That's consistent with Vision Corporation's market share segment.

We asked the participants what features they wanted when purchasing the product and this table shows their answers in descending order of importance. As you can see across this row and down this column, Vision Corporation's current product offering includes only one of the top three most desired features.

Finally, we asked the participants to rank the product offered by Vision Corporation against those of the top [bad word]  and the results are shown in this bar chart. Vision Corporation received the best rankings for "affordability," but suffered in all the other categories. This line graph shows that these figures have held steady over the four months we've conducted these focus groups. We believe this means that [bad word] would be justified in raising the price of its product and using the additional revenue to improve the product's features.

Hannah begins her presentation by saying that she conducted eight focus groups, each with 10 to 12 people who currently use the product. That means that she asked a total of 80 to 96 people for their opinions about the product. Remember a focus group is a way [bad word] get information from their customers by bringing in 8 or 10, or 12 people into a single room, and asking them questions – interviewing them together.

Hannah says that in the pie chart she's showing them, the yellow-shaded area represents the participants who buy the product from Vision Corporation. So, Hannah is showing them a pie chart. "pie (pie) chart" is a visual or picture used in reports and presentations and it is a circle made of different colors where the size of each piece of the pie represents the percentage or number of something. "pie" is normally a round thing that you eat; it's a sweet dessert. Here, a "pie chart" means a round circle that is divided up into pieces that represent percentages or numbers. When Hannah says the "yellow-shaded area," she means the section, or part, of the circle with a yellow color.

Hannah says that the participants represented in the yellow-shaded [bad word] only 13% of the people she spoke with. To [bad word] quot; [bad word]  means to be a group that is made up of something or that contains different parts or things. You might say, for example, the United Nations [bad word] of representatives from every country in the world; that would be a use of the verb [bad word] " In other words, Hannah is pointing to a pie chart that represents all the people she spoke with who use the product. One section of that pie chart represents 13% of the people; that part – that section is shaded, or colored, in yellow, representing the people who use the product that Vision Corporation sells.

Hannah says that this is "consistent with Vision Corporation's market share segment." To be "consistent" (consistent) is to [bad word] with,