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| Business Words in the News
Friday 24 May 2002
Vocabulary from the business news. Listen to and read the report then find explanations of difficult words below.
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Hong Kong Unemployment
Summary: Hong Kong has just released new figures that show the territory's unemployment rate is higher than ever before. According to the government, more than seven percent of the labour force are now out of work. This report from Damian Grammaticas.
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| | The News | |
| | | Five years ago Hong Kong was one of Asia's miracle economies, a booming trading city where almost everyone had a job. Unemployment stood at just two percent.
Since then the territory, and the rest of Asia, have been through a financial crisis, followed, last year, by a second downturn.
And now every month brings gloomy news. Unemployment in the territory, which had already shot up to seven percent at the start of 2002 - the highest level ever recorded - has edged up even further to 7.1 percent.
While places like Korea and Taiwan have shaken off the global downturn and begun to bounce back, Hong Kong is still struggling.
In the past three months almost twenty-thousand jobs have vanished from its economy. Large companies have been downsizing. There have been layoffs in manufacturing, banks, services and restaurants.
The government is hopeful that the situation is slowly turning around, led by an increase in exports, which have begun to grow again.
But in the coming months there will be a flood of school and university leavers entering the job market. And there are concerns Hong Kong is seeing the birth of a problem it's never had to face before: significant and lasting unemployment.
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| | The Words
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| | | booming
highly successful
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| | | stood at just two percent
was only two percent
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| | | downturn
in an economic downturn, the state of the economy becomes worse
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| | | shot up
increased; if something shoots up, it increases rapidly
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| | | edged up
gradually increased; if something edges up, it increases slowly
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| | | shaken off
managed to fight off, freed themselves from
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| | | bounce back
improve again
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| | | downsizing
reducing the number of employees
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| | | layoffs
redundancies; when there are layoffs in a company, people are made unemployed
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| | | turning around
improving
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