(Business: Intermediate)
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Test your Professional English (Business: Intermediate) | |
Publisher: Penguin English Guides
Author: Steve Flinders
106 pages
Price £7.50
ISBN 0-582 45149 3
This month we finished part 3 of our business studies course. For these people who need to study even more business English, we decided to look at a book in Penguin's Test your Professional English series. We chose the Business Intermediate volume, though there are ten others (so far) in the series. They all have the same format, so even if you are interested in one of the other books, this review will still have some useful information.
There are eight sections in the book, each section being about 10 pages long. and with slightly under eight tests per section. (There are sixty tests altogether.) The answer key is at the back together with a useful index of all the vocabulary used in the book. The sections each have a theme. For example the section called "Business and you" has exercises on "Your pay", "Your pension" "Your education" and so on. This layout is sensible, and helps you to organize your vocabulary learning. It also looks at common business mistakes, and even has an exercise on 'sexist language' - (one suggestion is that you use chairperson instead of chairman).
The book is a standard A5 size, which makes it just slightly too large to put into a suit pocket. The editors have decided that the colours should be black and orange, which is slightly surprising at first, but you soon do not notice it. Most of the space in the book is well used and there are not many large white spaces with nothing written in them. There are also fewer line drawings than in many of the other 'Test Yourself' books, and this edition seems to take itself more seriously than the classic 'Test your vocabulary' books which started off the series for Penguin many years ago.
This does not mean that the book is boring. The exercises are the usual mix of gap-fills (cloze) tests, word matching, and find the anagram, and there is a word search puzzle and cartoon captioning exercise for those moments when you want something more relaxing. If you are wondering why the cover of the book is a baby pink colour, it is because England's top financial newspaper - the Financial Times is published on pink paper. (And the publisher of the FT, Pearson, is very closely connected with Penguin publications.)
Who is this book for? Though it says 'Intermediate' on the cover, it can be used just as well by advanced students, or even native speakers of English who need to build up a business vocabulary. It is probably better as a self-study book, though it could also work as a class set, especially for an imaginative teacher who could expand the activities in the book into busuness language games for the class.
Verdict: Get it if you need to improve your business vocabulary - but if you need more general vocabulary, there are better choices.
Assessment 8/10