Welcome back to Business English Pod for today’s lesson, the first in a two-part series on financial English for discussing an audit.

Financial audits have a way of increasing stress within a company. Suddenly everyone’s paying attention as reports get checked, numbers are reviewed, and details that seemed minor yesterday become urgent today. Audits can feel intense, but they are a critical part of good business practice.

Like many other financial processes, the world of audits has its own language or vocabulary. And much of this language comes in the form of “collocations.” Collocations are words that go together naturally. They are combinations of words that we learn as a group, rather than individually.

For example, a minute ago I said “everyone suddenly pays attention.” We always use that verb “pay” with the noun “attention.” It’s a strong collocation. That expression includes a verb and a noun, but collocations can feature any word forms. “For example” is a collocation that has a preposition and a noun, for example.

In today’s dialog, we’ll hear a conversation between Ray and Marcia. Ray is the Chief Financial Officer for an international company. Marcia is an auditor with an accounting firm hired to do an audit of Ray’s company. During their conversation about the upcoming audit, Ray and Marcia use many English collocations. We’ll explain these collocations later in the debrief.

Listening Questions

1. What does Ray hope to do in the week following the 15th of the month?
2. What does Marcia want to “walk through,” or review, with Ray?
3. Ray asks about something that is a hot topic, in Marcia’s opinion. What does he ask about?

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