VOA慢速英语 2007 0107a

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I'm Phil Murray with Words and Their Stories, a program in Special English on the Voice of America. Today we tell about some American expressions that are commonly used in business.

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Bells sound. Lighted messages appear. Men and women work at computers. They talk on the telephone. At times they shout and run around.

This noisy place is a stock¹ exchange. Here expert salespeople² called brokers³ buy and sell shares of companies. The shares are known⁴ as stocks⁵. People who own stock in a company, own part of that company.

People pay brokers to buy and sell stocks for them. If a company earns money, its stock increases in value. If the company does not earn money, the stock decreases in value.

Brokers and investors⁷ carefully watch for any changes on the Big Board. That is the name given to a list of stocks sold on the New York Stock Exchange.

The first written use of the word with that meaning was in a newspaper in Illinois in eighteen thirty-seven. It said: The sales on the board were one thousand seven hundred dollars in American gold.

Investors and brokers watch the Big Board to see if the stock market is a bull⁸ market or a bear market. In a bear market, prices go down. In a bull market, prices go up.

Investors in a bear market promise to sell a stock in the future at a set price. But the investor⁶ does not own the stock yet. He or she waits to buy it when the price drops.

The meaning of a bear market is thought to come from an old story about a man who sold the skin of a bear before he caught the bear. An English dictionary of the sixteen hundreds said, To sell a bear is to sell what one has not.

Word experts dispute⁹ the beginnings of the word bull in the stock market. But some say it came from the long connection of the two animals -- bulls¹⁰ and bears -- in sports that were popular years ago in England.

Investors are always concerned about the possibility of a company failing. In the modern world, a company that does not earn enough profit is said to go belly¹¹ up. A company that goes belly up dies like a fish. Fish turn over on their backs when they die. So they are stomach, or belly, up.

Stock market investors do not want that to happen to a company. They want a company whose stock they own to earn more profit than expected. This would sharply¹² increase the value of the stock. Investors are hoping for a windfall.

The word windfall comes from England of centuries ago. There, poor people were banned from cutting trees in forests owned by rich land owners. But, if the wind blew down a tree, a poor person could take the wood for fuel. So a windfall is something wonderful that happens unexpectedly¹³.

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This Special English program, Words and Their Stories, was written by Jeri Watson. This is Phil Murray.