job-related friends and activities.
The quality of nursing care is being affected dramatically by these situations. (45)
________________________________. Consumers of medically related services have
evidently not been affected enough yet to demand changes in our medical system. But if
trends continue as predicted, (46) ________________________________.
Part IV Reading Comprehension (Reading in Depth) (25 minutes)
Section A
Directions: In this section, there is a short passage with 5 questions or incomplete
statements. Read the passage carefully. Then answer the questions or
complete statements in the fewest possible words. Please write your
answers on Answer Sheet 2.
Questions 47 to 51 are based on the following passage.
Google is a world-famous company, with its headquarters in Mountain View,
California. It was set up in a Silicon Valley garage in 1998, and inflated (膨胀) with the
Internet bubble. Even when everything around it collapsed the company kept on inflating.
Google’s search engine is so widespread across the world that search became Google,
and google became a verb. The world fell in love with the effective, fascinatingly fast
technology.
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 (统计) 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 (有先见之明的)
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.