Versión de HTML Básico
UNIT
2
Financial statements and ratios
21
Which comments do you agree with? Howwould you respond to the people you don’t agree with?
OVER TO YOU
In your experience, what do people think of the work done by accountants? What do they generally
think about financial statements?
How can accountants make the numbers they produce easier to understand?
Managing Director:
This is e
_____________
16
the problem. There are many ways
to change the numbers to give a better p
_____________
17
. Some of my peers
have been guilty of doing just that. The accountants and auditors have to
t
_____________
r
_____________
18
for the way that numbers are reported.
Accountants and their work are extremely important, they just need to make
it all a little easier to understand.
Investor:
All those numbers, and I haven’t g
_____________
a c
_____________
8
what they all mean. Pages and pages of them, and apparently they are often only
‘estimates’, or they can be i
_____________
9
in one of many ways. What’s the
p
_____________
10
when the accountants t
_____________
11
can’t agree on
how to show the numbers? Most of us need a lot more information and
knowledge about a company than what we get in the accounts.
Layman:
Is it all ready that hard? Can’t we just look at the profit or loss of
the company to f
_____________
o
_____________
12
how it’s doing? I don’t
see all the f
_____________
13
. Accountants are there to tell us about the
numbers, and I thought that’s what they do. They are t
_____________
14
to
report these numbers, and it can’t be that hard to c
_____________
u
_____________
15
everything that’s happened.
Trader:
I agree that the accounts of the companies have a lot of
information, but it’s very hard to understand it all. In my job, I need to know
the f
_____________
s
_____________
4
of a company. People interested
in the stock exchanges r
_____________
o
_____________
5
experts like
me. But there are also many other s
_____________
6
of information. As for
the accounting rules, they don’t interest me, or anyone else, at all. That’s
s
_____________
7
for the accountants.
Accountant:
The financial statements of a company are the most important
documents that a company produces. Investors, c
_____________
1
, banks,
customers – everybody reads the statements. The accounts show what a company
does with its money, how p
_____________
2
it is, and also how risk-worthy it is.
And you can see warning signs for the future. Our s
_____________
e
_____________
3
depend on properly prepared accounts.
OUTPUT
Listen to what these people say about financial statements and fill in the gaps.
9
AUDIO