I am Field Mark, with words and their stories, a program in special English on the voice of America.
Today,we tell about some America expressions that are commonly used In business. Bell sound, lighted messages appeared, Men and women work in computers, they talk on the telephone, and the times they shout and run around. This noisy place is a stock exchange. Here expert sales people call brokers, Buy and sell shares of companies. Shares are known as Stocks. People who own stock in a company own part of that company.
People pay brokers to buy and sale stocks for them. If a company who earns money, its stock increases in value. if a company does not earn money, the stock decreases in value.
Brokers and investors carefully watch for any changes on “the big board”. That is the name given to a list of stocks showed on the NY stock exchange. The first written use of the word with that meaning was in a news paper in Eleanor, in 1837. It said “The sales on the board were 1700 dollars in American gold. Investors and brokers watch the big board, to see if this stock market is a bull market or a bear market. ” In a bear market, prices go down; in a bull market, prices go up.
Investors in a bear market, promise to sell a stock in the future at a set price. But the investor does not own the stock yet, he/she waits to buy it when the price drops. The meaning of the “Bear market” thought to come from an old story, about a man sold the skin of a bear before he caught the bear. An English Dictionary of the sixteen hundred, said, “To sell a bear, is to sell what one has not.”
Word experts dispute the beginning of the word “Bull” in the stock market. But some say it came from the long connection of the two animals, the bulls and the bears. In sports that were popular years ago in England.
Investors are always concerned about the possibility of a company feeling. In the modern world, a company that does not earn enough profit is said to go belly up; a company that goes belly up, dies like a fish. Fish turn over on their backs when they die, so their stomach or belly up.
Stocks market investors do not want that to happen to a company. They want the company whose stock they own, to earn more profit than expected. This would sharply increase the value of the stock.
Investors are hoping for a windfall. The word “windfall” comes from England, a century ago. There, poor people were banned from cutting trees or forest owned by rich land donors. But if the wind that blew down the tree, a poor person could take the wood for fuel. So a windfall is something wonderful that happens unexpectedly.
This special English program “words and their stories”, was written by Jerry Watson, this is Field Mark.
[ 本帖最后由 ssissia 于 2008-4-21 18:50 编辑 ] |