google owes much of its success to the brilliance of s. brin and l. page, but also to a series of fortunate events. it was page who, at stanford in 1996, initiated the academic project that eventually became google’s search engine. brin, who had met page at a student orientation a year earlier, joined the project early on. they were both ph.d. candidates when they devised the search engine which was better than the rest and, without any marketing, spread by word of mouth from early adopters to, eventually, your grandmother.
their breakthrough, simply put, was that when their search engine crawled the web, it did more than just look for word matches, it also tallied (統計) and ranked a host of other critical factors like how websites link to one another. that delivered far better results than anything else. brin and page meant to name their creation googol (the mathematical term for the number 1 followed by 100 zeroes), but someone misspelled the word so it stuck as google. they raised money from prescient (有先見之明的) professors and venture capitalists, and moved off campus to turn google into business. perhaps their biggest stroke of luck came early on when they tried to sell their technology to other search engines, but no one met their price, and they built it up on their own.
the next breakthrough came in 2000, when google figured out how to make money with its invention. it had lots of users, but almost no one was paying. the solution turned out to be advertising, and it’s not an exaggeration to say that google is now essentially an advertising company, given that that’s the source of nearly all its revenue. today it is a giant advertising company, worth $100 billion.
注意：此部分試題請在答題卡2上作答。
47.apart from a series of fortunate events, what is it that has made google so successful?
48.google’s search engine originated from ________ started by l. page.
49.how did google’s search engine spread all over the world?
50.brin and page decided to set up their own business because no one would ________.
51.the revenue of the google company is largely generated from ________.
section b
directions: there are 2 passages in this section. each passage is followed by some questions or unfinished statements. for each of them there are four choices marked a), b), c), and d). you should decide on the best choice and mark the corresponding letter on answer sheet 2 with a single line through the centre.
passage one
questions 52 to 56 are based on the following passage.
you hear the refrain all the time: the u.s. economy looks good statistically, but it doesn’t feel good. why doesn’t ever-greater wealth promote ever-greater happiness? it is a question that dates at least to the appearance in 1958 of the affluent (富裕的) society by john kenneth galbraith, who died recently at 97.
the affluent society is a modern classic because it helped define a new moment in the human condition. for most of history, “hunger, sickness, and cold” threatened nearly everyone, galbraith wrote. “poverty was found everywhere in that world. obviously it is not of ours.” after world war ii, the dread of another great depression gave way to an economic boom. in the 1930s unemployment had averaged 18.2 percent; in the 1950s it was 4.5 percent.
to galbraith, materialism had gone mad and would breed discontent. through advertising, companies conditioned consumers to buy things they didn’t really want or need. because so much spending was artificial, it would be unfulfilling. meanwhile, government spending that would make everyone better off was being cut down because people instinctively—and wrongly—labeled government only as “a necessary evil.”
it’s often said that only the rich are getting ahead; everyone else is standing still or falling behind. well, there are many undeserving rich—overpaid chief executives, for instance. but over any meaningful period, most people’s incomes are increasing. from 1995 to 2004, inflation-adjusted average family income rose 14.3 percent, to $43,200. people feel “squeezed” because their rising incomes often don’t satisfy their rising wants—for bigger homes, more health care, more education, faster internet connections.