Welcome to this podcast from Learning British Accent.com. 
On this weeks episode, tune in to hear:
- Beauty Salon Vocab
- Pinocchio Part 1 fariytale
- Lucy Lockett Nursery Rhyme
- News Article recording “From Thought To Profit Part 1”
TRANSCRIPT:
Beauty salon
Massage
Facial
Manicure
Pedicure
Nail polish
Nail varnish
Hairdresser
Hairstylist
Wash
Shampoo
Conditioner
Pinocchio
Carlo Collodi Fairy Tales
Geppetto, a poor old wood carver, was making a puppet from a tree branch. “You shall be my little boy,” he said to the puppet, “and I shall call you – Pinocchio.” He worked for hours, carefully carving each detail. When he reached the mouth, the puppet started making faces at Geppetto. “Stop that, you naughty boy,” Geppetto scolded, “Stop that at once!”
“I won’t stop!” cried Pinocchio.
“You can talk!” exclaimed Geppetto.
“Of course I can, silly,” said the puppet. “You’ve given me a mouth to talk with.” Pinocchio rose to his feet and danced on the table top. “Look what I can do!” he squealed.
“Pinocchio, this is not the time to dance,” Geppetto explained. “You must get a good night’s rest. Tomorrow you will start going to school with the real boys. You will learn many things, including how to behave.”
On his way to school the next morning, Pinocchio stopped to see a puppet show.
“I can dance and sing better than those puppets and I don’t need strings,” boasted Pinocchio. He climbed onto the stage.
“Get off my stage,” roared the Puppet Master. Then he noticed how much the crowd liked Pinocchio. He did not say anything and let Pinocchio stay. “Here, you’ve earned five copper coins,” the Puppet Master told Pinocchio.
“Take these coins and go straight home,” said the Puppet Master. Pinocchio put the coins into his sack.
He did not go very far before he met a lame Fox and a blind Cat. Knowing that Pinocchio had money, they pretended to be his friends. “Come with us. We’ll teach you how to turn those copper pieces into gold,” coaxed the sneaky Cat.
“We want to help you get rich. Plant your coins under this magic tree. In a few hours they’ll turn to gold,” said the Fox.
“Show me where,” said Pinocchio excitedly. The Cat and Fox pointed to a patch of loose dirt. Pinocchio dug a hole and put the sack in it, marking the spot with a stone.
“Splendid!” exclaimed the Cat. “Now let’s go to the inn for supper.” After supper, the Fox and Cat, who weren’t really lame or blind, quickly snuck away and disguised themselves as thieves. They hid by the tree waiting for Pinocchio to come back and dig up the money. After Pinocchio dug up the coins they pounced on him.
“Give us your money!” they ordered. But Pinocchio held the sack between his teeth and resisted to give the sack to them. Again they demanded, “Give us your money!”
Pinocchio’s Guardian Fairy, who was dressed all in blue and had blue hair, sent her dog, Rufus, to chase the Fox and Cat away. She ordered Rufus to bring Pinocchio back to her castle. “Please sit down,” she told Pinocchio. Rufus kept one eye open to watch what was going on.
“Why didn’t you go to school today?” she asked Pinocchio in a sweet voice.
“I did,” answered Pinocchio. Just then, his nose shot out like a tree branch. “What’s happening to my nose?” he cried.
“Every time you tell a lie, your nose will grow. When you tell the truth, it will shrink,” said the Blue Fairy. “Pinocchio, you can only become a real boy if you learn how to be brave, honest and generous.”
The Blue Fairy told Pinocchio to go home and not to stop for any reason. Pinocchio tried to remember what the Blue Fairy told him.
On the way to home he met some boys. “Come with us,” said the boys. “We know a wonderful place filled with games, giant cakes, pretty candies, and circuses.” The boys didn’t know that if you were bad, you were turned into donkeys and trained for the circus.
It was not very long before the boys began changing into donkeys. “That’s what happens to bad boys,” snarled the Circus Master as he made Pinocchio jump through a hoop.
Pinocchio could only grow a donkey’s ears, feet, and tail, because he was made of wood. The Circus Master couldn’t sell him to any circus. He threw Pinocchio into the sea. The instant Pinocchio hit the water, the donkey tail fell off and his own ears and feet came back. He swam for a very long time. Just when he couldn’t swim any longer, he was swallowed by a great whale. “It’s dark here,” scared Pinocchio said.
Pinocchio kept floating deep into the whale’s stomach. “Who’s there by the light?” called Pinocchio, his voice echoing.
“Pinocchio, is that you?” asked a tired voice.
“Father, you’re alive!” Pinocchio shouted with joy. He wasn’t scared anymore. Pinocchio helped Geppetto build a big raft that would hold both of them. When the raft was finished, Pinocchio tickled the whale. “Hold tight, Father. When he sneezes, he’ll blow us out of here!” cried Pinocchio.
Home at last, Geppetto tucked Pinocchio into his bed. “Pinocchio, today you were brave, honest and generous,” Geppetto said. “You are my son and I love you.”
Pinocchio remembered what the Blue Fairy told him. “Father, now that I’ve proven myself, I’m waiting for something to happen,” he whispered as he drifted off to sleep.
The next morning Pinocchio came running down the steps, jumping and waving his arms. I He ran to Geppetto shouting, “Look Father, I’m a real boy!”
The End
Lucy Lockett
Lucy Locket lost her pocket,
Kitty Fisher found it;
Not a penny was there in it,
But a ribbon round it.
From thought to profit: How ideas become viable businesses
By Matthew Davies
Timothy Mitchell is excited. The 27-year-old eccentric genius says he’s cracked artificial intelligence (AI).
His computer code and programs actually have the ability to learn. They also have the ability to make him a great deal of money.
It is an idea that could revolutionise business; drastically cutting down on the time spent monitoring, repairing and protecting computer systems, because AI will learn to do it by itself.
So, to bring his idea to a wider audience, Timothy, who’s the chief executive of Dot AIN, headed to this year’s Future in Review (FiRe) conference.
Set in the lush grounds of a posh hotel in California’s Orange County, about an hour’s drive south of Los Angeles, the annual FiRe gathering brings together some of the brightest minds in the United States and beyond.
There is little doubting Timothy’s credentials. At just 18, he did so well in Microsoft’s entrance tests that they thought he must be cheating. He joined the software giant as a senior architect and director, and his expertise has been sought out by Wall Street banks and government agencies.
But he describes himself as an inventor, an ideas man. So, how did he turn his vision into a viable business?
Believe
For Timothy Mitchell the first step is getting over the fear of the future.
“I have seen thousands of ideas die on the vine, because the individuals that have them never get over that fear of failing,” he says.
To pursue his dream, he gave up a directorship at Microsoft and put his money where his mouth is. He cashed in some of his assets, including the savings he was putting away for his retirement.
Taking an idea down the path towards being a profitable business is risky, but being fully aware of the risks is key.
“You have to understand what the worst-case scenario is and be comfortable with that,” he said. “For me, the absolute worst scenario was, I’d spent what I’d built up and I’d have to go back to work. Once you understand that, it’s much easier to get over that initial fear of starting.”
Jon Myers, the founder and chief executive of Graphene Technologies, a company that makes the highly flexible yet strong material graphene from carbon dioxide, agrees.
But he also adds that the desire to bring an idea to market needs to be tempered with a degree of realism and common sense.
“Never put yourself in a position where you’re risking your family and risking putting food on the table,” he said. “I’ve seen a number of people go there and lose it all. Family and everything.”
Team up
There’s also the issue of finding a partner. Having an idea is all well and good, but communicating that idea to potential investors and customers is paramount.
John Petote is an angel investor who has put his money into over 50 start-ups over the past 15 years.
At the conference he’s known as a FiRespotter, usually a seed capital investor who invites an ideas person (a FiRestarter) to come to the event.
For him, the people who have both brilliant technical ideas and the know-how to turn them into effective businesses are rare. He points to the late Steve Jobs of Apple as the outstanding example of this.
“When I talk to a technical person who has a great idea, I like to see that they’re bringing a partner in who has more of a business side to them.
“The technical types can be so enthusiastic about their idea that they forget to do market validation,” he adds.
Timing is also crucial. If an idea is deemed as being “years ahead of its time”, by definition it cannot be commercially viable. This, of course, is more a refection on the market place than the idea itself, says Jon Myers.
“What I’ve learned through painful successes and painful failures is that the new idea is rarely right on time – the new idea is either far too early or far too late.”
“But if you have a book inside you, are you going to decide I can’t write this book because my audience isn’t there? No. You’re going to write the book. That’s part of the creative process,” he adds.
Be patient
While timing is important, time itself is equally so. When asked how long their ideas had taken to become established business, the overwhelming answer from the entrepreneurs gathered at FiRe was “longer than expected”.
“Every business I’ve founded, I thought would be successful within three years. Absolutely none of them were successful within three years,” said Jon Myers, “It’s always taken twice as long, three times as long, as I imagined it would.”
This brings up the dilemma of when to let go. This doesn’t just apply to the situation early on in the process when the idea is simply not positively received by either potential customers or possible investors.
When an idea evolves into a business, it changes into something that has dynamism of its own, and moves further away from the original creator. Timothy Mitchell knows this from experience.
“People see companies almost like they see their children. And there comes a point in time when you’re building a company where it has to move off and develop on its own,” he says.
“It’s going to take on its own life and there’s going to be pieces in it that make their own decisions. I had to back myself off at times”
Terrible odds
Plus, of course, it’s a numbers game.
Of the millions of ideas that people have each year, only a tiny fraction are developed and an even smaller fraction of those ever start down the road to becoming highly successful businesses.
A recent study from economic think tank the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation found that on average, of the thousands of technology start-up companies that come into existence each year in the United States, between 15 and 20 of them one day end up with $100m worth of sales.
This appears to be a pretty constant rate. The report’s author, Paul Kedrodsky, says: “The pace at which the United States produces $100m companies has been surprisingly stable over time, despite changes in the nature of the US economy.”
But the high rate of failures has never put off any of the delegates at the FiRe conference. Here they equate ideas with a deep-seated urge to solve problems.
As such, they all agree that an idea will not get off the ground if there’s a lack of passion.
Timothy Mitchell is adamant on this point. “Never try to start a company with something you don’t like, because it will never go anywhere. Only do something that you truly enjoy.”
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