ACADEMIC LISTENING TEST PRACTICE
MONEY - 5 WAYS TO BECOME RICH
MONEY - 5 WAYS TO BECOME RICH
For Students Preparing for Academic Tests / IELTS and TOEFL
Listen as you read the script.
Playing Time: 2 minutes 57 seconds
“Money makes the world go round,” is a well-known idiom in English. It means that if you want to buy a house, or travel round the world or study at a good college, or university, you will need money, and, probably, lots of it. So, how can you get more money to do all these things? How can you become rich? Many people will give you lots of different advice. Here is my own personal list of five simple and practical things you can do to make your bank account really take off.
Number one: Save your money. Don’t always spend the money you make on things you don’t really need. Here is an often-used illustration of what I mean. If you spend three dollars on a cup of coffee every day at work, that’s $15 per week, or about $60 a month. Over a year, that will cost you about $720 and over twenty years all those cups of coffee will add up to $14,000.
Number two: Choose your friends carefully. Make friends who are rich, or want to become rich, just like you do. When you do this, you will learn more about how to make money. Warren Buffett, one of the richest people in the world, gives this advice: “It’s better to hang out with people better than you.”
Number three: Find out what you really love to do and then focus your time and energy on that. Steve Jobs, creator of Apple Computer, often talked about focus. You need to be so excited about what you do that it makes you get up early in the morning, while other people are still sleeping.
Number four: The fourth thing you can do to become rich might sound a bit strange. Don’t work. Robert Kiyosaki, the famous author of ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’, says that perhaps you should try to start your own successful business instead of working for someone else. Does that mean you should be the boss? No, he says, being a boss is also a kind of job, and takes too much time and hard work. Instead, pay someone to be the company boss for you. Very simply, you should first own a business and then make your money do all the work for you.
Finally, number five: Start young and keep learning from your financial mistakes. You are human and, no doubt, over time you will make many of them. But that’s okay. It’s easier to lose ten thousand dollars when you are twenty-five than when you are sixty-five.
Number one: Save your money. Don’t always spend the money you make on things you don’t really need. Here is an often-used illustration of what I mean. If you spend three dollars on a cup of coffee every day at work, that’s $15 per week, or about $60 a month. Over a year, that will cost you about $720 and over twenty years all those cups of coffee will add up to $14,000.
Number two: Choose your friends carefully. Make friends who are rich, or want to become rich, just like you do. When you do this, you will learn more about how to make money. Warren Buffett, one of the richest people in the world, gives this advice: “It’s better to hang out with people better than you.”
Number three: Find out what you really love to do and then focus your time and energy on that. Steve Jobs, creator of Apple Computer, often talked about focus. You need to be so excited about what you do that it makes you get up early in the morning, while other people are still sleeping.
Number four: The fourth thing you can do to become rich might sound a bit strange. Don’t work. Robert Kiyosaki, the famous author of ‘Rich Dad Poor Dad’, says that perhaps you should try to start your own successful business instead of working for someone else. Does that mean you should be the boss? No, he says, being a boss is also a kind of job, and takes too much time and hard work. Instead, pay someone to be the company boss for you. Very simply, you should first own a business and then make your money do all the work for you.
Finally, number five: Start young and keep learning from your financial mistakes. You are human and, no doubt, over time you will make many of them. But that’s okay. It’s easier to lose ten thousand dollars when you are twenty-five than when you are sixty-five.
Note: For more cool ESL resources about money, visit my All Things Topics site.
