📝 Workbook · Business · Unit 4

Workbook · 4B — Describing trends

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Exercise 1

Exercise 1 — Trend collocations

Complete each sentence with ONE phrase from the box.

Word bank — drag or tap, then tap a gap
  1. Sign-ups  drop  in the first week of the campaign — from 200 a day to almost 900.
  2. Web traffic  drop  at around 40k sessions/week for the whole quarter.
  3. Revenue  drop  in Q1 after the outage, then  drop  once the fixes shipped.
  4. Our headcount has  drop  from 20 to 40 in twelve months.
  5. Ignore the Black Friday week — it's an  drop .
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Exercise 2

Exercise 2 — Zero, first or second?

Choose the best conditional and complete the sentence.

  1. General rule: if we ___ (cut) ad spend 20%, sign-ups ___ (drop) about 15%.
  2. Realistic plan: if the November renewal ___ (close), we ___ (beat) plan.
  3. Hypothetical: if the market ___ (crash) tomorrow, we ___ (freeze) hiring.
  4. Realistic: if we ___ (hold) the current spend, we ___ (flat-line) at €5.4m.
  5. Hypothetical: if churn ___ (halve), we ___ (hit) €7m without touching sales.
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Exercise 3

Exercise 3 — Fix the grammar

Each sentence has ONE conditional error. Rewrite it.

  1. If we will grow 20%, we hire two more engineers.
  2. If we cut prices, sign-ups going up.
  3. If we would double the ad budget, we would grow 15%.
  4. If the November deal closes, we would beat plan.
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Exercise 4

Exercise 4 — Chart shape ↔ verb

Match each chart shape to its most natural verb.

Drag or tap a meaning, then tap the word
  • Line rises very steeply for one month, then holds.
    drop or tap here…
  • Line drops sharply, then climbs back to previous level.
    drop or tap here…
  • Line stays at roughly the same level for six months.
    drop or tap here…
  • Line rises slowly and consistently every month.
    drop or tap here…
  • Line falls fast and stays down.
    drop or tap here…
  • Line grows from 20 to 40.
    drop or tap here…
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Exercise 5

Exercise 5 — Three chart-walkthroughs

You'll hear three managers walk the same chart (monthly churn: 3.0% → 4.5% over six months).

🎙️ Three chart-walkthroughs — multi-voice

  1. Which manager wins the CEO slot?
  2. Which manager buries the story in adjectives?
  3. Which manager overcommits without evidence?
Show transcript

Vera (Priya):So what you're seeing is a concerning trajectory. Meaningful degradation over the trailing six-month window represents non-trivial exposure, particularly in mid-market.

Henrique (Rafael):The story is this — monthly churn climbed steadily from 3.0 to 4.5% over six months. It started when we deprecated the old onboarding in March. If we fund the onboarding rebuild — one engineer, six weeks — we'll bring it back under 3% by year-end. If we halved prices tomorrow, we'd stop the bleeding, but we'd gut the margin. So the ask is the engineer, not the price cut.

Priya (Danny):Yeah, churn's up but I'm confident. Better onboarding, better pricing, we're brainstorming. Give us the quarter and we'll definitely bring it back under 2%.

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Exercise 6

Exercise 6 — Write a 3-sentence chart-walkthrough

Pick a real chart from your work. In 3 sentences (max 55 words): (1) shape + baseline → current, (2) first-conditional base case (no action), (3) first-conditional ask (the lever you'd pull + expected outcome).

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Exercise 7

Exercise 7 — Case study reflection: The board deck

Think about the Meridian Analytics case. Answer the questions.

  1. What is the ONE change you'd force the CEO to make in her opening 15 seconds?
  2. Design the ONE slide the CEO will keep coming back to when the board asks 'what happens if it's wrong?'
  3. What ONE-sentence coaching rule would you pin to the top of every finance slide from now on?
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