Using English at Work：15 Attending the Morning Meeting(1)

Welcome to lesson three of ESLPod.com's "Using English at Work." I'm your host, Dr. Jeff McQuillan, from the Center for Educational Development.

In the second lesson of "Using English at Work," we learned vocabulary for checking mail, email, and voicemail.

In this third lesson, I'm going to talk about attending, or going to, a morning meeting.

Let's listen to the story first at a slow speed.

I arrive at the conference room right before the meeting starts, and sit down in a chair around the large conference table.

Our manager passes out a handout¹ of the meeting agenda² with some announcements and goes over some bullet points regarding old and new business.

Then, he asks each person to give a status report on his or her projects.

Each of us takes turns giving a quick rundown, while everyone else listens.

Of course not everyone is paying attention, since they're thinking about their own reports and what they plan to say.

Sometimes our manager will make some comments or give us some feedback, but usually there's very little discussion.

The meeting always ends the same way.

Our manager gives a short summary of how our department is doing and a little pep talk to get us motivated.

Now it's back to our desks to do some work!

Our story begins when I arrive, or come to, the conference room right before the meeting starts, and sit down in a chair around the large conference table.

A "conference" is a type of large meeting, usually a formal meeting.

A "conference room" is a large room in an office building that is used only for meetings; it's not an office.

A "conference table" is the large table inside the conference room.

Conference tables are usually big, round, or perhaps rectangular³ tables that have chairs placed around them for the meetings.

Usually the meeting leader, the person who is running the meeting, sits at one end of the conference table so everyone can see him or her.

1 handout   

n.散发的文字材料；救济品

参考例句：

• I read the handout carefully.我仔细看了这份分发的资料。
• His job was distributing handout at the street-corner.他的工作是在街头发传单。

2 agenda   

n.议事日程，记事册

参考例句：

• We now proceed to the next item on the agenda.我们现在着手讨论下一项议题。
• If there is no objection,the agenda is adopted.如果没有意见，议程就通过了。

3 rectangular   

adj.矩形的，成直角的

参考例句：

• He put a rectangular box on the table.他把一个长方形的箱子放在桌子上。
• The equations are written in rectangular coordinates.这些方程是在直角座标系中写出的。