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| Business Words in the News
Friday 25 April 2003
Vocabulary from the business news. Listen to and read the report then find explanations of difficult words below.
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OPEC cuts
Summary: After a meeting in Vienna, the oil producers' organisation OPEC has announced that it will cut production by about two million barrels a day. This report from Andrew Walker:
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| | The News | |
| | | The group came to this meeting fearing that prices would continue their recent sharp decline. Their remedy is a cut in production to curtail the extent to which the members are exceeding their agreed quotas, something they have been doing in order to prevent shortages arising as a result of the war in Iraq.
But the complex agreement involves an increase in formal output quotas in an attempt to bring actual production in line with what they have agreed. One analyst said that the picture underlying this agreement is that the group is in effectparcelling out the market share of Iraq to the other ten member countries.
OPEC officials say they are expecting Iraqi production to be in effect zero for the time being. They also say that they hope that Iraq will come back into the market soon. What they don't say is that if it does, it could create a painful dilemma for the group's other members: either accept a lower price or give up those additional production quotas they have just given themselves.
Andrew Walker, BBC News, Vienna
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| | The Words
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| | | sharp decline
sudden very big fall
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| | | remedy
cure; successful way of dealing with a problem
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| | | cut
reduction
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| | | curtail
reduce; restrict
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| | | quotas
stated amounts; the required quantities to be produced
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| | | in line with
following; to be the same as
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| | | in effect
to summarise; it is more or less true to say; in effect is added to a statement to indicate that it is a general summary of a situation
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| | | parcelling out
dividing into parts in order to share
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| | | the market share
the share of the total sales
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| | | dilemma
a difficult choice to be made between different courses of action
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