BEP 408 – Quality Control 1: Manufacturing

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Welcome back to Business English Pod for today’s lesson, the first in a two-part series on quality control. In this lesson, we’ll focus on the manufacturing side of things.

Successful companies understand the importance of quality. At minimum, quality control is about meeting industry standards or regulations. Beyond that, quality is a huge factor in brand reputation and customer satisfaction. And a commitment to strong QC, or quality control, can also lead to significant cost savings.

Given these benefits, no wonder many companies have entire teams or positions dedicated to monitoring quality. And, just like any other area of expertise, quality control comes with its own special language. Much of this language appears in set expressions that we call “collocations.” In fact, I just used one when I mentioned “monitoring quality.” To monitor quality is a common collocation related to quality control.

Collocations are just natural combinations of words. Certain verbs and adjectives always go with certain nouns. And certain nouns often combine to create a special meaning. If you just learn new words individually, you might miss these natural combinations.

In today’s dialog, we’ll hear a conversation between Paolo and Emma. Paolo works for a company that manufactures, sells, and services solar panels. Emma is a quality control consultant. Paolo’s company is looking to hire Emma to conduct a quality control audit, or a review of their systems. During their conversation, they use lots of English collocations, which we’ll explain later in the debrief.

Listening Questions

1. What does Paolo say they did after completing a safety audit?
2. What kind of testing will Emma’s work not include?
3. What is the purpose of “pulling samples” in quality control?

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