With my marketing and media relations English classes at the business school where I work, after a few lessons, I hit them with a seemingly very simple question, which flummoxes most of those in the room. That question is “What are you?”. It elicits any number of responses, and leads to many puzzled faces when I say, “Yes, true, and…”.
After several attempts, some of those in the classroom cotton on to what I’m looking for – remember these are marketing and media relations masters, but I also ask the students on other master courses the same question – usually around the time they are being prepared for job interviews designed to test their levels of English.
So what is the answer to this innocent sounding question? And what has this got to do with Italy?