TITLE?

_________________________

By Charles Smith

1. In 1971, Daisuke Inoue, an amateur electrone (electric organ) player at a Kobe club whose
specialty was accompanying singing customers was asked to go to a year-end office party to
play for one of the club’s regular customers.
2. Instead of going to the party, Mr. Inoue recorded a tape accompaniment. He later founded a
company, Crescent, which rented to clubs in the Kobe area tapes of popular songs
accompaniments and speaker boxes equipped with echo devices designed to make the singer’s
voice sound better.
3. Karaoke (literally “empty orchestra”) became a household word in Japan and the world.
Surprisingly, Inoue now runs a company which makes insect traps, but it was Crescent which
provided the seed from which Karaoke was born, though it took others to introduce many
improvements to the system.
4. Sharp, an Osaka-based electronics manufacturer, represents a very different model of Kansai
innovation. Founded in 1915 to make propelling pencils, it built Japan’s first mass-production
radio receiver in 1925, its first television set in 1953 and, in the late 1960s, became the first
Japanese company to market electronic calculators, beating Tokyo’s Casio Computer Company.
5. The company’s main strength is liquid crystal display technology used, for example, in the
LCD Viewcam, a video camera. As a technological leader in consumer electronics, Sharp has a
record which bears comparison with household names from the neighboring Kanto region —
and a history that goes further back than any of its Kanto competitors.
6. Tatsuo Yamamoto, director general of the Kansai New Business Conference, is certain the
Kansai region can and will produce more Sharps, but he recognizes a big problem: as is the case
in Kanto, innovation in the financial sector has failed to keep up with progress in manufacturing
and services.
7. To encourage a more risk-oriented attitude among investors, and to introduce the idea of
business “angels”, his group hopes to open a venture university which would offer courses for
wealthy individuals on how to invest in emerging companies. If it materializes, Mr.
Yamamoto’s plan will be yet another example of Kansai setting a trend that the rest of Japan
might want to follow.

Taken from: Market Leader, Pearson Education, Longman, 1999.

 Do the following exercises based on the text:

I. Skimming – What is the most suitable title for the text?

1. KARAOKE: Its origins in Japan

2. KANSAI: Innovations from the home of Karaoke
3. KANTO: Greatest competing region of Japan

II. Scanning-Scan the text in order to complete the following statements with accurate
and precise information.
1. What is the name of the company created by Mr. Inoue? _______________.
2. What is the name of the company that became the first Japanese company to
market electronic calculators? When was it founded?
3. What does LCD stand for?

III. Vocabulary:

1. There are two-words expressions in paragraphs 3 and 5 that mean almost the same
thing: “something very familiar to everyone”. What are they?
__________________________________________________
2. Match 1-7 with a-g to form expressions from paragraphs 4 and 5.

1. consumer a. set
2. electronic b. receiver
3. electronics c. production
4. mass d. manufacturer

5. radio e. electronics
6. television f. camera
7. video g. calculators

3. Find words and expressions in paragraph 7 that mean:

a. rich
b. growing firms
c. starting a tendency
d. a project
 e. ready to take risks
f. an academic institution for investors

IV. Noun Pre-modification Groups (4, 5 or More Words)

Paragraph # of NPG Head Noun Translation

# Words