Vocabulary for summarizing & finishing presentations exercise
The end and the beginning of a business presentation in English are the most important parts. At the end, you need to summarize the main points and arguments of your business presentation, and often make predictions about what will happen in the future. But remember, it needs to be short!
In this online exercise on presentations, you'll see an example of a good ending to business presentation and learn English vocabulary and phrases you can use when doing it (words and phrases for summarizing, predicting and actually finishing it). Although the focus is on business presentations, these phrases can also be used in other types of presentations.
In many presentations this wouldn't actually be the end of you talking, you would follow this summary part by accepting questions from the audience. To learn both what to say and how to deal with audience questions in that part, do our online exercise on how to answer questions in presentations.
Click here to see more online exercises on presentations and presentation vocabulary
Exercise: Summarizing in a presentation
In the following text, a man is finishing a business presentation on improving staff performance.
From the context, try to guess what the meaning of the words/phrases in bold are and why they are being said. Then do the quiz at the end to check if you are right.
Speaker:'Let me end by briefly recapping the main parts of my presentation.Firstly, we talked about how relative staff costs have increased for the majority of large companies over the last 10 years, if not longer. Secondly, we identified that the main cause of this rise stemmed from staff isolation, due to the expanding use of Information Technology in the workplace, reduced direct physical communication and contact between managers and their staff, and out of date management strategies and processes. And lastly, I suggested that one way to resolve this big issue is to adapt a new way of managing staff, where more direct physical communication takes places not only between managers and their staff, but between the staff themselves.
I cannot emphasize too strongly the importance that this last part is for your business. We have already seen the rise of companies in the far east, whose ways of working are different to our own and whose relative staff costs are substantially lower than here in the west.
In the near future, they will not only be cheaper, but they will have the experience and products to directly compete with you! You need to keep in mind this, because without introducing these fundamental changes in managing your staff, in the long-term you will struggle to innovate and compete with your competitors from Asia without a shadow of a doubt.
Although this may all sound doom and gloom, I would like to restate that you can change this. It is in your hands. But you have to change now!
I would like to finish by thanking you for your time and I hope that this has been of some use to you.'
Quiz:
Below is a definition/description of each of the words/phrases in bold from the above text. Now choose the word/phrase from the question's selection box which you believe answers each question. Only use one word/phrase once. Click on the "Check" button at the bottom of the quiz to check your answers.
When the answer is correct, two icons will appear next to the answer. The 
icon contains extra information on the word/phrase. In the 
icon, you can listen to the pronunciation of the word/phrase.
Practice
Now that you understand the meaning of the words/phrases and when to use them, practise using them by creating your own sentences with them in English. Also click on the icon next to each correct answer and listen how each is pronounced correctly.
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