50．A．observation B．recognition C．judgment D．puzzle
A
What is eBay?
The simple answer is that it is a global trading platform World Records where
nearly anyone can trade practically anything. People can sell and buy all kinds
of products and goods. Including cars, movies and DVDs, sporting goods, travel
tickets, musical instruments, clothes and shoes---the list goes on and on.
The idea came from Peter Omidyar, who was born in Paris
and moved to Washington when he was still a
child, at high school, he became very interested in computer programming and
after graduating from Tuft
University in 1988, He
worked for the next few years as a computer engineer. In his free time he
started Bay as a kind of hobby, at first offering the service free by word of
mouth. By 1996 there was so much traffic on the website that he had to upgrade(升级) and he began charging a fee to
members. Joined by a friend, Peter Skill, and in 1998 by his capable CEO, Meg
Whitman, crashes of the late
1990s, eBay has gone from strength to strength. It is now one of the ten most
visited online shopping websites on the Internet.
eBay sells connections, not goods, putting buyer and seller into
contact with each other. All you have to do is to take an e-photo, write a
description, fill out a sales form and you are in business; the world is your
market place. Of course for each item(商品) sold eBay gets a percentage and that is a great deal of money.
Every day there are more than sixteen million items listed on eBay and eighty
percent of the items are sold.