Business English- Describing Companies with the Present Simple and Progressive

Describing companies with Present Simple and Continuous

Try to describe your company by completing some of the sentences below, starting with any you like. Your partner will then check your sentences, including asking for more details if they don’t know much about your company.

• We almost never provide…
• At present we are waiting to hear about…
• At present … is changing.
• We are preparing to… at the moment.
• We are trying to… at the moment.
• At this time, our market share is becoming…
• At this very moment many employees are thinking about…
• … is currently
• We are currently setting up a new…
• We are currently planning to…
• Our subsidiaries generally suffer from…
• People generally know that our company…
• The workforce hardly ever works…
• In general we deal with…
• … is doing well just now.
• … is having a difficult time just now.
• We mainly sell…
• We mostly do business…
• … is declining slowly now.
• Employees occasionally complain about…
• We often work with…
• Employees often have problems with…
• Employees attend… at least once a month.
• We need to… once every two years.
• We are presently working on…
• We are presently looking for…
• Employees rarely…
• … is gradually rising right now.
• … is rapidly increasing right now.
• Customers sometimes complain about…
• The company sometimes gives…
• We hold… three times a year.
• We change… twice a year.
• We usually hire staff who…

What are the two different present tenses above? What are the differences between them?

Without looking above, add time expressions etc to the two columns below: 

Put your pens down and spend one minute looking for more examples on the previous page. Then add more without looking above again.

Check your answer with the previous page. Many more time expressions are possible, so please check if you wrote something different.

Use those time expressions to make more statements about your company.

Use the time expressions to make statements about yourself which you think might be true about your partner too. You get one point for each time your partner says “Me too!”