Against All Odds: The Culture and Idioms of Risk-Taking in America: Stories for Learning Useful Business Idioms

is Volume Two of the series with . (See series description below.) Travel along with Lucy, a Vietnamese refugee and now a high-tech engineer, on a business trip to Las Vegas where her personal and professional future are at risk, and she is faced with life-changing choices. One of the final steps in mastering American English is becoming comfortable with the informal, everyday, sometimes humorous English expressions not usually taught in textbooks. Non-native speakers in the business world are especially challenged when understanding an idiom is critical to understanding the underlying message of a conversation or presentation. Misunderstanding an idiom can lead to confusion or even embarrassment. Dictionaries of idioms fill shelves and online searches, but an alphabetized list of idioms and definitions does not easily enable users to really comprehend its usage because those listed idioms are not explained in the context of any conversation. A better way to remember and become proficient with idioms is to learn them within the cultural context from which they originated. and other books in the series, not only give precise definitions of the idioms, but embed the idioms within the context of the business-oriented story, so readers will quickly internalize and recall them during critical meetings and conversations.