Greece and Africa 26 Feb 10

I had an aim to self-assess what skills do I have to listening tasks, especially how I can understand the authentic speech.
I have listened a podcast from BBC World Business Weekly. This podcast is about the Greek and African economy. I’ve listened it three times and I understand it rather good. Sometimes the vocabulary was hard to recognize and I stopped listening and translated it.
Well, the last former head of the Greek statistical service was the first. He said about the responsibility of the information he gave when he had worked in the service since 2004. So he “washed his hands” at full responsibility that he had. In fact, the deposit in Greece in 2009 was 12.7% of national income according to the social government. Moreover, this forecast was made for three times. The next General Secretary of Greek statistic service blamed the previous minister. Furthermore, Greek had some problems with Germany due to misunderstanding of this situation.
Second part of this podcast was devoted for African economy. Steve Evans, one of the interviewers, firstly, talked about the square building project in “airport-city”. In spite of duration of this works as three years, it is expected to finish this project in September of this year. Domestic housing sector was quite gloomy. The investment in that part was 400 million dollars.
Then the managing director of the world bank talk of the damaging impact on Africa of the global downturn. People thought that crises wasn’t in Africa according the managing director, but it was wrong. Some African countries were hit their drops, their exports, they had more job losses and more hunger. As the example she said that more than 200 000 jobs were lost in the Democratic Republic of Condole. Some families had only two or one meal a day and children dropped out of school. So human consequences were dramatic. More than 64 million people had to be back into the poverty as the result of economic crisis. And the director said that the situation would be worse and worse.
These podcasts helped me to realize how well I am ready to pass my English exam.