Act out a phone conversation with your partner. Choose from the given situations 1-5.

A. You’re a manager of the International Trade Company. One of your customers is ringing to rearrange the meeting. This meeting is quite important because it can result in increasing profits of your company. So urgency is obvious. (Next Wednesday you hold negotiations; next Friday you are meeting Japanese delegation and spending all day with them.)

B. You are a customer. You are ringing the International Trade Company (ITC) to rearrange the meeting. You are very busy. So you have only 3 days a week when you can meet representatives of ITC (This week is busy; next week: Wednesday, Friday and Saturday suit you best.)

A. You are a secretary. You are in charge of organizing a meeting. You have to call Mr. Brown to confirm the date, the time and the place of the meeting. The meeting is important and urgent.

B. You are Mr. Brown. You are going to be on holiday in 3 days. You have got a lot of work to do. You would prefer to delay all meetings you have arranged.

A. You are a manager of a Human Resource Department. You are interviewing a candidate for a managerial position in the Finance Department.

B. You are applying for a job. You are interested in a position of a manager in any Finance Department. Now you are being called for an interview.

A. You are a publisher of an international directory of famous business people. Someone calls you about some mistakes in their entry. Make a note of the errors so you can make corrections before the next printing.

B.A publisher has included an entry on you in an international directory of famous business people. Unfortunately, it contains a lot of mistakes. Phone the publisher to correct them. (They misspelt your name. They said you are ten years older than you really are. They said you speak Chinese, but you don’t)

A. You are the editor of a trade magazine. One of your readers calls you about some mistakes in one of your articles. Make a note of the errors so you can print corrections along with an apology next month.

B. There is an article about your company in one of your trade papers. Unfortunately, it contains a lot of mistakes. Phone the editor and complain. Explain what it should have said. (They misspelt your company’s name. They misspelt the name of one of your products. They said your company’s headquarters are in Chicago, USA)

READING 2

Have you heard about or dealt with telephone selling? Is it a good way to sell something?

Read the text and find the main disadvantage(s) of telephone selling.

TELEPHONE SELLING DRIVES ME MAD!

I’m really fed up with the telephone selling. I keep picking up the phone at home, only to find that the person on the other end is trying to sell me something. Most of these calls seem to be in the early evening, just when I’m trying to cook or take a relaxing bath, or when I’m getting ready for an evening out.

I never want the products or the services on offer, but for some reason, I find it hard to say no and to put the phone down. If I say it is inconvenient, they don’t take any notice at all, but continue putting their message across, explaining why I must buy immediately before the special offer period ends up. I know there is a definite skill involved in dealing with this nuisance callers, which what they are.

Although I’m bad at hanging up at the very beginning, I have tried a simply walking away from the phone, hoping that when I finally return 10 minutes later, the caller will have given up. This doesn’t always work though! Do other readers have the suggestion on how I could deal with these calls more effectively? They are driving me completely mad!

3. Look through the text again, think about the main idea of it. Then working in a small group, write a poem about telephone selling. Your poem should have only five lines and the following structure:

topic

2 adjectives

3 verbs

a phrase, characterizing the author’s or reader’s attitude

conclusion in a word or phrase

for example, Life

fast and slow

hurries, stops, flows

don’t haste. Life isn’t

waste.

Project work

Prepare a Power Point presentation on the topic “The history of telephone”.