Some Facebook users are able to order food and buy tickets on the social media site. The new service was launched in the United States. Facebook designed it as a new way of building bridges between its users and commercial organizations where they live.
This idea is not new. There are many smart phone applications that already let users search, order and buy many different products and services. But Facebook’s service is a little different. It lets users share information about their favorite places and things with family and friends. Facebook says its new tool makes it easier for users to organize their friends’ favorite places and things in one place.
When users write Facebook posts seeking advice on local places or services, they can choose whether or not to turn on the new feature called Recommendations. If a user turns this on, Facebook friends can then comment on those posts and give suggestions. It also allows users to order food and buy tickets. Users can also go directly to a Recommendations bookmark on Facebook to ask a new question or to offer help to their friends. The new service lets people order food directly from the Facebook pages of some restaurants. Users can also purchase tickets to movies, music events or other activities. They can also make appointments for personal services, such as getting a haircut.
Facebook is testing the service in the United States. It plans to offer it to international users in the future. The new service is part of recent efforts by Facebook to expand its offerings and get people to spend more time using the social media app. It announces a new era(时代) to Facebook, which also means a kind of convenience for people.
1. Why did Facebook design the new service?| A．To improve its competitiveness. | B．To link users with native businesses. |
| C．To accelerate its development. | D．To satisfy its users’ demands. |
| A．It adds a unique Recommendations feature. |
| B．The information it provides is far from enough. |
| C．Its operation is more convenient and human-based. |
| D．It enables users to share information about their favorites. |
| A．The advantages of Recommendations. | B．The characteristics of Recommendations. |
| C．Things users can do on Recommendations. | D．The way of turning on Recommendations. |
| A．It aims at attracting more new users. | B．It has gained widespread popularity. |
| C．It has greatly enriched people’s lives. | D．Its application has geographical limitation. |
相似题推荐
【推荐1】Accessing the Internet isn’t normally a problem when you’re inside your own home-it’s secure. When you are in a public place, it’s a different story. You can access Wi-Fi in more places than ever, enabling you to keep in touch or catch up with work from wherever you happen to be.
No public Wi-Fi network is absolutely secure. That depends as much on who’s on it with you as who provides it. Be careful with the public Wi-Fi network popping up on your phone in a shopping mall, or a network operated by a third party that you’ve never heard of
If you can, stick to as few public Wi-Fi networks as possible. In a new city, connect to Wi-Fi in a store or coffee shop you’ve used before, for example.
Don’t give away too much information.
| A．Using a bit of common sense doesn’t hurt |
| B．A public Wi-Fi network is less secure than your personal one |
| C．The more networks you sign up to |
| D．Be very cautious if you are asked for a lot of personal details |
| E．If you have to connect to networks like this, choose those you trust |
| F．It’s up to you to decide whether the trade-off is worth it for some free Internet access |
| G．But getting online isn’t quite as safe as with your home network |
【推荐2】Textspeak is an informal term for the abbreviated (缩写的) language used in text messaging and other forms of electronic communication. In the digital age, it’s common to hear how textspeak is ruining language. Some people argue that technology has made us lazy about how we speak and write.
Of course, language does change when it’s used digitally. Textspeak is an evolution of language. It’s even the focus of a field of linguistics (语言学) called CMC, which is committed to the study of interaction facilitated by technology like computers, mobile phones and tablets.
Contrary to the idea that these innovations are aggravating language, CMC demonstrates a creative repurposing of symbols for technology. These swift and clever evolutions illustrate the flexibility of language and its capacity to communicate meanings not relating to words.
People have been complaining about language being “ruined”. In A.D. 63, for example, a Roman scholar complained that students of Latin were writing in an “artificial language”. In fact, this writing was a new language that would become French! Similarly, in 1871, the then-president of Harvard University said,“Bad spelling, incorrectness, inelegance of expression in writing, and ignorance of the simplest rules of punctuation... are far from rare among the young who are well-prepared for college studies.”
Today, people are able to communicate rapidly using a wide variety of tools and technologies. Perhaps no linguistic development better indicates changes in the ways we communicate than the popular emoticon (表情符号). It is a visual representation of a smiley face turned sideways. Although an emoticon may look like a smile, a frown or any number of facial expressions, it doesn’t really represent a face. Instead, it’s intended to convey a feeling, such as “I’m happy” or “just joking”.
So, far from ruining language, the example indicates how people can now communicate complex feelings in a simple manner. This kind of change is perfect for our modern, fast-paced world.
1. What can be learnt about “textspeak” from the text?| A．It has ill effects on language. |
| B．It is ruining language in the digital age. |
| C．It is a visual representation of facial expressions. |
| D．It is an evolution of language and communication. |
| A．Language changes and adapts to new technologies. |
| B．Language has become more rigid with technology. |
| C．Language is being corrupted by modern innovations. |
| D．Technology has made us lazy in our use of language. |
| A．Simplifying. | B．Opposing. | C．Worsening. | D．Shortening. |
| A．Indifferent. | B．Favorable. | C．Doubtful. | D．Objective. |
【推荐3】Most people agree that eating healthy food is important. But sometimes making good food choices can be difficult. Now there are apps that can help people learn about the food they eat to improve their health and their dining out experience.
Open Table app
Open Table app helps people choose restaurants when they want to go out to eat. It is a free service that shows users restaurant available based on where and when they want to dine. It gives users points when they make reservations, which can add up to discounts (折扣) on restaurant visits.
Max McCalman’s Cheese &Wine Pairing app
Wine and cheese can be a great combination. But which wines go best with which cheeses? Max McCalman’s Cheese & Wine Pairing app can help. It provides information about hundreds of different cheeses and suggests wines to pair with each. Max McCalman’s Cheese & Wine Pairing app is free.
Happy Cow app
Vegetarians do not eat animal meat. Vegans do not eat any animal products. The Happy Cow app is made for both groups. Users can search for vegetarian-vegan restaurants and stores around the world.
Local Eats app
Restaurant chains, like McDonalds, can be found almost anywhere a person might travel. But sometimes travelers want to eat like locals. The Local Eats app is designed for that. It can help you find local restaurants in major cities in the US and in other countries. It costs about a dollar.
Where Chefs Eat app
“Where Chefs Eat” is a 975-page book. Most people would not want to carry that around. But there is a much lighter app version of the same name for just $15. Six hundred chefs provide information on 3,000 restaurants around the world on the Where Chefs Eat app.
1. What can users get when making a reservation with Open Table app?| A．Points | B．Books. | C．Wine. | D．Cheeses. |
| A．local foods. | B．wine and cheese |
| C．vegetables | D．animal meat |
| A．OpenTable. | B．Where Chefs Eat |
| C．Local Eats | D．Max Me Calman’s Cheese & Wine Pairing. |
【推荐1】That people often experience trouble sleeping in a different bed in unfamiliar surroundings is a phenomenon known as the “first-night” effect. If a person stays in the same room the following night they tend to sleep more soundly. Yuka Sasaki and her colleagues at Brown University set out to investigate the origins of this effect.
Dr. Sasaki knew the “first-night” effect probably has something to do with how humans evolved. The puzzle was what benefit would be gained from it when performance might be affected the following day. She also knew from previous work conducted on birds and dolphins that these animals put half of their brains to sleep at a time so that they can rest while remaining alert enough to avoid predators（捕食者）. This led her to wonder if people might be doing the same thing.
To take a closer look, her team studied 35 healthy people as they slept in the unfamiliar environment of the university’s Department of Psychological Sciences. The participants each slept in the department for two nights and were carefully monitored with techniques that looked at the activity of their brains. Dr. Sasaki found, as expected, the participants slept less well on their first night than they did on their second, taking more than twice as long to fall asleep and sleeping less overall. During deep sleep, the participants’ brains behaved in a similar manner seen in birds and dolphins. On the first night only, the left hemispheres（半球）of their brains did not sleep nearly as deeply as their right hemispheres did.
Curious if the left hemispheres were indeed remaining awake to process information detected in the surrounding environment, Dr. Sasaki re-ran the experiment while presenting the sleeping participants with a mix of regularly timed beeps（蜂鸣声）of the same tone and irregular beeps of a different tone during the night. She worked out that, if the left hemisphere was staying alert in a strange environment, then it would react to the irregular beeps by stirring people from sleep and would ignore the regularly timed ones. This is precisely what she found.
1. What did Dr. Yuka Sasaki find puzzling about the “first-night” effect?| A．To what extent it can trouble people. |
| B．Why it might be related to evolution. |
| C．What measures should be taken to solve it. |
| D．In what way it can be beneficial. |
| A．The brain activity of participants’ sleeping was monitored in a new environment. |
| B．The participants were from the Department of Psychological Sciences. |
| C．The differences between the two sides of participants’ brains were studied. |
| D．The findings were tested on birds and dolphins. |
| A．She wanted to know if humans do the same as birds and dolphins. |
| B．The previous experiment failed her expectation. |
| C．She wondered if human’s left hemispheres stayed alert on the first night. |
| D．The “first-night” effect phenomenon was too tough for her to analyze. |
| A．It can be got rid of. | B．It contributes to sleepers’ keeping guard. |
| C．It can be improved. | D．It originates from sleeping patterns. |
【推荐2】It seems that the Englishmen just cannot live without sports of some kind. A famous French humorist once said that this is because the English insist on behaving like children all their lives. Wherever you go in this country, you will see both children and grown-ups knocking a ball about with a stick or something, as if in Britain men shall always remain boys and women girls! Still, it can never be bad to get exercise, can it?
Taking all amateur(业余)and professional sports in Britain into consideration, there can be no doubt that football is at the top of the list. It is called soccer in the United States. The game originated(起源于)in Britain and was played in the Middle Ages or even earlier, though as an organized game, or “association football”, it dates only from the beginning of the 19th century.
The next is rugby, which is called “football” in the United States. It is a kind of football played by two teams of fifteen players than eleven. In rugby, an oval-shaped ball is used which can be handled as well as kicked. It is a pretty rough game.
In summer, cricket is the most popular sport. In fact, it has sometimes been called the English national game. Most foreigners find the game rather slow or even boring, but it enjoys great popularity among the British.
Tennis rates high on the list, too. It was introduced into England from France in the 15th century, but it was from England that it spread to practically every country in the world.
Table tennis, or “ping-pong”, surely is not played on a great scale as it is in China or Japan. Basketball and volleyball were introduced into Britain during the late 19th century from America and are gaining popularity. Horse-back riding, swimming, rowing and golf all attract a lot of people.
1. The main purpose of Paragraph l is to tell us that the English__________.| A．are all sports lovers | B．behave like children |
| C．like to kick a ball around | D．can remain young all their lives |
| A．They differ in the shape of the ball. | B．They are played by different numbers of players. |
| C．They both can be handled. | D．They both can be kicked. |
| A．basketball | B．tennis | C．rugby | D．football |
| A．The Most Popular Sports | B．The English Sports |
| C．History of Sports | D．Sports in Britain |
【推荐3】Do you like to eat many different foods at the same time? Most of us do, but to buy twenty dishes at a restaurant is just too expensive for most Americans. A good way is to eat a potluck (便餐会) meal.
The idea is to have many families in a community prepare one or two dishes only and bring them to a large room. Many soups, salads, meats, hot dishes, cold dishes, desserts, and drinks are put on the table at one time. Each family member then takes a paper plate, a plastic knife, a fork, a spoon and a paper cup. In turn, they pick out the food they want to eat and fill their own plates with a balanced meal. Then, they sit with either their family or friends.
When they finish, they may go back to the table and eat more food for there is always more than the group can eat at one time. Following the meal, every one puts their paper plates and cups as well as the plastic knives, forks, and spoons into the rubbish container.
At many potlucks, the people then begin having fun. A group of four men may sing as a Barbershop Quartet. A pianist or a violinist may play a solo. Often there is group singing. Sometimes there is a liar’s contest. Three people are chosen to tell a story. They leave the room and two come back and tell a true story while one tells a lie. The lie must be a clever story so it will be hard to choose which of the three stories is not true. The liar’s contest always causes every one to laugh loudly.
Everyone leaves the potluck in good spirits as they have all eaten a very good meal and they have enjoyed themselves very much.
1. What does the phrase potluck meal probably mean?| A．A meal contained in a pot that will bring you good luck. |
| B．An ordinary meal for several families |
| C．A big meal for some special guests. |
| D．A meal where many families eat together each preparing one or two dishes. |
| A．A group of three men may sing as a Barbershop Quartet. |
| B．A pianist or a violinist may play as a Barbershop Quartet. |
| C．Three people are often chosen to have a liar’s contest. |
| D．Three people are chosen to tell a true story. |
| A．the lie is also a true story |
| B．the lie is told by a clever liar |
| C．the lie is required to be a clever story |
| D．the true stories are easy to tell |
| A．To introduce one of the American community activities. |
| B．To speak highly of American social activities. |
| C．To show a very effective way to eat well. |
| D．To show the importance of a potluck meal. |
