Business Vocabulary in Use (with answers), Advanced, w. CD-ROM

I've always been interested in language, languages and language learning, ever since an uncle lent me his Teach Yourself Serbo-Croat. This book seemed extremely exotic in 1950s south London, and was one of the things that got me interested in languages at school. In our first year French coursebook, I was intrigued by a certain Monsieur Oublietout (Forget-all) who was asking his way to, of all places, the barracks. Memories of this has meant that, in my own materials writing, appropriate language input for the level has been one of my aims.

A Spanish degree at Edinburgh University followed, and then a gap year travelling around Latin America. On returning, a year of teacher training, specialising in English in UK secondary schools, persuaded me that adult ELT might be more in my line, and I joined an adult education organisation in Sweden called Folkuniversitetet.

Apparently it was the fact that I'd mentioned the Andes on my CV that encouraged Folkuniversitetet to send me to the Swedish far north. But it was working with managers at a mining company up there that interested me in business English. They were dealing with mining projects around the world, and I was drawn by the attraction of teaching the language as a means of international communication, rather than the then twee EFL of red telephone boxes and Tower of London beefeaters. (A relatively light schedule allowed time for a lot of cross-country skiing on floodlit tracks during those 20-hour-long arctic winter nights.)

I then did a very congenial MA for English Language Teaching at Lancaster University, at a time when discourse analysis was all the rage, and I'm still interested in that, but the real revolution in language teaching brought about by corpus analysis was still ten years in the future. By this time I was in France, working mainly in private language schools, teaching English and training teachers, first in the south and then in Paris. Between the two, I did a postgraduate management