This lesson will show you a variety of ways of describing trends over time.
This lesson will dig deeply into the language of trends. Native speakers use a wide variety of words and phrases to describe this, so it's important to have a vocabulary for trends.
This lesson may be quite vocabulary-heavy, so take it slow and allow the student to take notes, make original sentences, and grasp the nuance of these words.
Describe the population growth of your country over the last 50 years. You don't have to be exact. Just talk about the general trends.
Ask your student to guess or do a quick Google search.
Don't spend too long on the warm-up. This is just to gauge their English level for this topic.
Vocabulary
First, let's establish a strong vocabulary base to describe trends:
- go up: rise, increase, grow, climb.
- go up a lot: take off, rocket, boom, explode.
- go down: decrease, drop, fall, decline.
- go down a lot: crash, plummet, plunge, collapse.
- go both up and down: fluctuate, be unsteady, be unstable.
- go down, then up: recover, pick up, bounce back, rebound, regain lost ground.
- stay flat (positive): remain stable, remain constant, remain steady.
- stay flat (negative): stagnate, stall.
- become flat: flatten out, bottom out, plateau, level off.
Now, work with your teacher to describe the trends of GDP in Japan, China and Germany.
Grammar
Talking about future trends often requires complex sentences with the conditional.
- "If we go with plan A, then sales will/should rise dramatically over the next 4 years."
This is a projected stock chart for the next five years. The red line is plan A, which was the client's preferred option. However, after a key finding and more complex analysis, you have found that the black line, plan B, offers better long-term growth. Discuss this graph.
First, describe the red line; then describe the black one.
Making recommendations
Trends by themselves are simply data, but consultants must use this information to make recommendations. Here is a list of choices you might recommend. Discuss each one. Can you think of any other ways to say it?
- Change course/change direction.
-
Pull out of a market/get out of the market.
- Stay on course
- Invest heavily
- Double down
Vocabulary
If your student is not Japanese, then you can use this interesting graph of global GDP over the last 2000 years.
Here are even more vocabulary words:
- go up: accelerate, soar
- go down: shrink, slump, halve
You do not have to use all the words in the list, but encourage the student to use as many as possible so they have a large and varied vocabulary.
Grammar
- If + present simple (If we go with this...),
- then + future (then sales will/should rise...)
- Also: will definitely; are projected to; will probably; might
Example:
- If we go with plan A, then we will see short-term growth. But, in the mid-term, sales are projected to crash and then continue dropping for the foreseeable future.
- However, if we go with plan B, then we'll see small short-term profits, but, if we stay on course, we'll see sustainable, long-term growth. Sales are projected to rise continuously for the next five years.
Making recommendations
Using the graph, have the student make recommendations to the client's choices below.
[Plan A is red, and plan B is black.]
- The client chose plan A and has been using it for 2 years.
- E.g.: The decline in sales over the last year, and the projected further decline, mean that profits will drop if we continue with plan A. So, we need to change course.
- The client chose plan A and has been using it for 3 years.
- E.g.: We need to pull out of this market. Sales are not going to recover.
- The client chose plan B and has been using it for 1 year.
- E.g.: We need to stay on course. Our projections show steady growth.
- The client is considering splitting their investment between plan A and plan B.
- E.g.: I strongly recommend investing heavily in plan B.
- The client invested lightly in plan B and sees a slight drop in initial sales. They are getting nervous.
- E.g.: We can't pull out. We need to double down! Our projections show strong mid-term growth.
Describe the following chart:
