Register Shifts — Unit 3, Upper-intermediate English
Swap phrasal and everyday verbs for precise Latin-based professional forms in emails, reports, and meetings.
Reading: Incident Update — Client Email
**From:** Helena Costa, Customer Success **To:** Northbridge Logistics (client) **Subject:** Service interruption — status update
Dear Mr Adeyemi,
Thank you for your patience yesterday. I am writing to **address** the upload failures your team reported between 14:00 and 17:30 UTC.
Engineering has **established** the root cause: a misconfigured cache rule introduced during a routine deploy. A permanent fix was **implemented** at 19:45, and monitoring confirms stability overnight. We **postponed** the optional feature release originally scheduled for this morning so resources could **investigate** and **ensure** full recovery before new code shipped.
Our team will **carry out** additional validation today, though in this message I use the formal equivalents your contract expects: we will **implement** further checks and **distribute** a technical summary to your IT contacts by noon. Please **contact** our duty manager if anomalies recur. The remediation plan is **in line with** our SLA and regulatory obligations and **in accordance with** the change-management standard we **discussed** last quarter.
We will **discuss** preventive controls at next week's review, including how we **ensure** escalation paths remain clear when incidents **increase** in volume. Customer Success will **submit** a root-cause brief to your portal once Legal clears wording.
Between yesterday and today, upload success rates returned to baseline. We will **indicate** in the summary which dashboards warrant monitoring, and we will **accelerate** deployment of preventive cache checks **in accordance with** the roadmap we **discussed** in September. If your team needs a live walkthrough, please **contact** me to **arrange** a short call.
Kind regards, Helena
**Follow-up correspondence, three days later**
Dear Mr Adeyemi,
Thank you for your reply of Wednesday, in which you **queried** whether the compensation offered **reflects** the operational impact your team **sustained**. I have **reviewed** the contractual position with Legal and can now **respond** substantively.
Under clause 9.2, service credits are **calculated** against monthly availability rather than against a single incident, and on that basis the interruption **falls below** the threshold at which credits are automatically **triggered**. I **appreciate** that this will not **strike** you as a satisfactory answer, and I do not **propose** to rest on it.
Accordingly, I have **secured** approval to **grant** a discretionary credit equivalent to one week's service, together with the removal of the professional-services charge for the migration work **scheduled** in February. This is **offered** without admission of liability, in **acknowledgement** that the incident **arose** from a change we **introduced** rather than from any external factor.
On your second point, I must **decline** — respectfully — the suggestion that the deploy **was undertaken** without adequate testing. The change **passed** all four stages of our pipeline. What our process did not **capture** was an interaction between the cache rule and a configuration unique to your tenancy, and I would rather **state** that plainly than **imply** a general failure of testing that the evidence does not **support**.
We are **amending** the pipeline to **incorporate** tenancy-specific configuration into pre-release validation. That work **is scheduled** for completion by the end of the quarter, and I will **confirm** progress at each monthly review rather than **await** the next incident.
I remain **available** should you wish to **discuss** any of the above.
Kind regards, Helena Costa
Vocabulary from this unit
| Informal / spoken | Formal / written | Example (formal) |
|---|---|---|
| put off | postpone | We postponed the review until May. |
| carry out | implement | We implemented the new workflow. |
| go up / go down | increase / decrease | Costs increased by six percent. |
| find out | establish / determine | IT established the root cause. |
| get in touch | contact | Contact the helpdesk before noon. |
| look into | investigate / examine | HR will investigate the complaint. |
| Informal | Formal | Example (formal) |
|---|---|---|
| talk about | discuss | The board discussed three scenarios. |
| set up | establish | We established a task force. |
| make sure | ensure | Ensure backups run nightly. |
| deal with | address / resolve | The memo addresses delays. |
| give out | distribute / issue | Guidelines were distributed regionally. |
| Phrase | Example |
|---|---|
| carry on → proceed | We will proceed with deployment after sign-off. |
| turn down → decline | The board declined the acquisition proposal. |
| cut down on → reduce | We reduced discretionary spend by twelve percent. |
| point out → indicate | The audit indicated gaps in access controls. |
| speed up → accelerate | We accelerated the rollout in priority regions. |
| work out → calculate | Finance calculated the impact on margin. |
| bring up → raise | I will raise the licensing issue at steering. |
| keep up with → maintain pace with | Support must maintain pace with ticket volume. |
| run into → encounter | Teams encountered integration errors during cutover. |
| hand in → submit | Please submit the risk register by Friday. |
| back out → withdraw from | The partner withdrew from the pilot programme. |
| in accordance with | Processing is in accordance with GDPR requirements. |
This is the free sample from this unit. The full unit adds 1 more reading passage, comprehension questions with an answer key, the listening exercises, flashcards for the vocabulary above, and a speaking task — with your progress tracked so the next unit unlocks when you are ready for it.
Common questions
What level is this unit?
Upper-intermediate — roughly CEFR B2. If you are not sure of your level, the course places you with a short diagnostic before you start rather than making you guess.
Do I need to pay to use this?
The reading passage and vocabulary on this page are free to read. The rest of the unit — the remaining passages, the exercises, the listening, the answer key and the progress tracking — is part of the paid General English course.
Is this British or American English?
British English spelling and vocabulary, which is what most learners in Azerbaijan are taught and what IELTS expects, though both are accepted in the exam.