How The Internet Is Changing Lives Forever
How The Internet Is Changing Lives Forever
How The Internet Is Changing Lives Forever
QUESTIONS
1. Read the text below and translate into Turkish (60 Points).
These days with inexpensive air travel, mobile phones, e-mail and the Internet, teenagers see the world as a
smaller place than it appeared to their grandparents. Due to these innovations, the Internet appears to be the one
with the most potential for global influence and which will change lives the most.
For example, people often made friends locally at school and continued those friendship into adulthood, but
many young people today find the majority of their friendships over the Internet. Paula Sen, who has just turned
25, says: “I’ve met most of my best friends over the Internet. I couldn’t live without the Internet. It’s my
lifeline.”
The Internet has also greatly influenced how people buy and sell goods. International Internet shopping is
now common, with people buying all sorts of goods, from sites such as Amazon, the most successful online
retail site. The international auction site eBay allows millions of participants to buy from and sell to strangers,
setting their own prices. But beware – there are as many unscrupulous salespeople online as on the high street.
One of the Internet’s greatest success stories is Wikipedia, the free online encyclopaedia, which is compiled
and updated by its users. It carries far more content than any other encyclopaedia and is a great starting point
for research, but remember to double-check important facts as it contains errors. If you don’t have time to check
your facts, consider purchasing a reliable online encyclopaedia such as Encyclopaedia Britannica. The other
major information resource on the Internet is Google, a search engine which finds and ranks web pages
according to the number of links made to them.
Probably the biggest impact of the Internet is social networking. People can meet new friends through sites,
they can renew old acquaintances and they can also play games with each other in virtual worlds. It’s now
much easier to share experiences with others too. Sites such as YouTube allow people to upload and share
videos, with unlikely clips becoming huge hits and a number of figures becoming Internet phenomena.
Much of the power of the Internet lies in the fact that people are developing new ways to be creative and
innovative, combining ideas and skills without an organisation or hierarchy. No one is in overall control.
Collective creativity and collaboration are the key ideas. But even more powerful than this is its power to solve
crimes, help change the world through giving to charities on sites like justgiving.com or find missing
individuals: one website for a missing child was visited by over 40 million people within days of its being set
up.
2. Read the text again and answer the questions (40 Points).