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4.5. Complete this article about Vivendi by putting each of the verbs in brackets into the past simple. Most of the verbs are irregular:

Vivendi: 150 years of history

Vivendi, the French utilities and communications group, has a long history going back to 1853. In that year the Government (1) … (create) Compagnie Generale des Eaux. The founders (2) … (have) two objectives: to irrigate the countryside for farming and to supply water to towns and cities in France.

In 1880 a treaty (3) … (give) Generale des Eaux the right to supply water to Venice, and then Constantinople and Oronto (4) … (come) soon after. By the time of the centenary celebrations in 1953 Generale des Eaux (5) … (supply) water to eight million peo-ple in France.

2

In the 1960s and 1970s the company (6) … (begin) activities in the area of civil construction and (7) … (build) a large tower block in the La Defense business district of Paris.

During the 1980s Generale des Eaux (8) … (join) with the Havas media group to create Canal Plus, a pay TV channel. They also (9) … (take) a controlling stake in the civil engineering giant, SGE. In the 1990s they (10) … (win) major contracts in the Asia Pacific region and in Latin America.

Jean-Marie Messier (11) … (become) CEO in 1996 and (12) … (run) the company along American lines. He (13) … (sell) $5 billion in assets and (14) … (cut) the workforce by 10 %. All this (15) … (mean) that an annual loss of $600 million (16) … (turn) into a profit of $320 million. In 1998 he (17) … (change) the name of the group to Vivendi and soon after (18) … (make) a series of partnerships and acquisitions in the telecommunications industry.

Operations in North America (19) … (grow) very quickly af-ter this and in 2000 (20) … (buy) Seagram to become a truly inter-national media and communications company.

4.6. Make a project on one of the suggested problems:

1. ‘A Company of My Dream’.

2. ‘If I Were a Director of a Company’.

3. ‘The Most Famous Boss in Our Country’. 4. ‘The History of Any Company’.

5. ‘The Most Famous Company Abroad’. 6. ‘The Most Famous Russian Company’.

3

UNIT III. MEETINGS

1. HOW WAS THE MEETING?

Text 1

Some colleagues are discussing the meeting they have just come out of. Remember the words and word combinations in bold type.

Anil: I thought it was very productive.

Juliet: Well, I thought it was a complete waste of time. I didn’t hear anything I didn’t already know.

Barbara: I agree with Anil. I felt we had some very useful discussions, and that we reached an agreement that was good for both sides. We certainly covered a lot of ground. It was incredible the number of things we got through.

Juliet: But there were too many digressions. John was ram-bling and kept wandering off the point. He just uses meetings as a chance to show off. Just like a lot of men: he just wanted to show how powerful he is and what a good talker he is.

Anil: But to be fair, the chair really kept things moving: she encouraged people to be brief and to stick to the point and we achieved a lot in a short time. Anyway, I learned a lot and I think they listened to what we had to say.

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