part 19: productivity Business Benchmark helps students get ahead fast with their Business English vocabulary and skills and gives them grammar practice in business contexts. It also helps students prepare for an internationally recognised Cambridge ESOL Business English exam, using real exam papers from Cambridge ESOL. Teachers can choose from the BEC edition or the BULATS edition at the right level for their students. | Productivity Getting started Discuss these questions in small groups. 1 What is productivity 2 What factors do you think have affected productivity in your country in recent years 3 How would what is happening in the picture on the right affect productivity 4 Is productivity always a good indicator of a company s performance Productivity at Magro Toys Speaking Magro Toys . based in Villena Spain is the Spanish subsidiary of a leading European toy manufacturer. Below are four charts which show aspects of Magro Toys performance over the last five years. Productivity ratio 60 000 50 000 40 000 30 000 20 000 10 000 0 Magro Toys 1 1 1 5 years ago 2 years ago now 1 Work in pairs and discuss these questions. 1 What do the charts show 2 What might have happened in this company to produce these results 3 What other information would you need in order to have a more complete picture of the company s performance 2 Change partners and present your conclusions to your new partner. Useful language Speculating They might have . Perhaps they. They could have. It s possible that. Maybe what happened was that . . It could might be that. page 98 Modal verbs to express degrees of certainty 90 Productivity Please purchase PDF Split-Merge on to remove this watermark. Reading 1 Read th is report to find out what happened at Magro Toys to produce the results shown in the charts on page 90. 2 In most lines of the report there is one extra word. However some lines are correct. Find the extra word or put a tick if the line is correct. 3 Read the report again and find examples of these features of a formal style of writing. 1 use of the passive 2 using noun phrases instead of verbs . an increase in turnover instead of turnover increased Magro Toys - Report on productivity The purpose of this report is to summarise changes in productivity at our Spanish subsidiary Magro Toys over the last ef five years and to suggest reasons why productivity gains were achieved up until .
