– Manuscript –
Welcome to English in a Minute!
I don’t know about you, but I love looking through cookbooks and finding new recipes.
Cook the Books
Are Anna and Jonathan going to tell me about a great new cookbook?
Speaker A: What happend to Rita the accountant? Her desk is empty…
Speaker B: She was fired! Turns out she was reporting all kinds of false earnings… for years.
Speaker A: Rita was cooking the books? Wow, that does not seem like her.
To “cook the books” means to be dishonest about a company’s earnings. This is illegal.
“Books” in this case refers to accounting books — where businesses record financial information. But “cook”? Word experts say this usage means to present something in an unnatural, changed form.
And that’s English in a Minute!
*This article has been edited and reprinted from VOA Learning English with permission from Voice of America (VOA) for use in English language materials.
English 
日本語