A commercial course 1. [antikvár]

PREFACEThere have been many books aiming at teaching CommercialPractice, and still more striving to teach English to Foreignstudents, but the present volume is, perhaps, unique inattempting to combine these aims, in trying, while giving anoutline of English business organisation, to enlarge thestudent's general vocabulary, to exercise him in grammaticalconstructions and to increase his power of expressing himself inEnglish with ease and clearness.This book, the first of two volumes, covers the essentialfeatures of modern English business. It glances briefly atEngland's position in the world of trade, at her industries andpowers of production. Then, in more detail, it surveys thevarious functions of commerce, the work of the wholesaler andthe retailer, the forms and the control of business organisationfrom the sole trader to the limited liability company. It dis-cusses the work of the various departments of a business con-cern, gives hints on Commercial Correspondence with avariety of examples, examines the various methods of pay-ment, traces the course and gives the documents of a home andof an export transaction.Throughout, an attempt has been made to smooth away theparticular difficulties of the foreign student and to enlightenhim on those matters where the commercial procedure of hiscountry differs from that in England.Each section of the book is followed by copious exercisesbased on the subject matter of that section. Of these exer-cises the ones marked A are designed to increase the student'sknowledge of English; those marked B to consolidate the workthat he has done, by causing him to review what he has justread, to think about the issues involved and to arrange andexpress his thoughts in good, plain English.The vocabulary of this book has been very carefully con-trolled but not stringently limited. Its basis is the vocabularyof the four books of Essential English plus about 500 new words;but every one of these words is defined within the EssentialEnglish vocabulary in the Glossary on pages 326 to 343.So that this volume shall reflect as far as possible the con-ditions of business life of the country as it really is, we haveincluded a judicious selection of the documents used in EnglishCommercial practice. Moreover, many of the business lettersincluded here are those actually used by some of the most