Like the look of our website Whatever the answer, the chances are you made your mind up within the first twentieth of a second. A study by researchers in Canada has shown that the snap decisions Internet users make about the quality of a web page have a lasting impact on their opinions.
We all know that first impressions count, but this study shows that the brain can make flash judgments almost as fast as the eye can take in the information. "My colleagues believed it would be impossible to really see anything in less than 500 milliseconds," says Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa. Instead they found that impressions were made in the first 50 milliseconds of viewing.
Lindgaard and her team presented volunteers with the briefest glimpses of web pages previously rated as being either easy on the eye or particularly unpleasant, and asked them to rate the websites on a sliding scale of visual appeal. Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television shot, their decisions tallied well with judgments made after a longer period of examination.
In the crowded and competitive world of the web, companies hoping to make millions from e-commerce should take notice." Unless the first impression is favorable, visitors will be out of your site before they even know that you might be offering more than your competitors," Lindgaard warns.
For a typical commercial website, 60% of traffic comes from search engines such as Google. This makes a user’s first impression even more critical. The lasting effect of first impressions is known to psychologists as the "halo effect": if you can snare people with an attractive design, they are more likely to overlook other minor faults with the site, and may rate its actual content more favorably.
This is because of "cognitive bias". People enjoy being right, so continuing to use a website that gave a good first impression helps to "prove" to themselves that they made a good initial decision. "It’s awfully scary stuff, but the tendency to jump to conclusions is far more widespread than we realize".
These days, enlightened web users want to see a "puritan" approach. It’s about getting information across in the quickest, simplest way possible. For this reason, many commercial websites now follow a fairly regular set of rules. For example, westerners tend to look at the top-left corner of a page first, so that’s where the company logo should go. And most users also expect to see a search function in the top right.
Of course, the other golden rule is to make sure that your web pages load quickly, otherwise your customers might not stick around long enough to make that coveted first impression. "That can be the difference between big business and no business".
Which of the following websites is most unlikely to be successful

A:a website with a lot of pictures of large size. B:a website that puts the logo of the company on the top-left corner. C:a website which can provide a clear outline in a simple design. D:a website with an appearance that can make your eyes comfortable.

According to comScore, Facebook is the leading social networking site based on monthly unique visitors, having overtaken main competitor MySpace in April 2008. According to Alexa, the website’s ranking among all websites increased from 60th to 7th in terms of worldwide traffic, from September 2006 to September 2007, and is currently 5th. Quantcast ranks the website 15th in U.S. in terms of traffic, and Compete. com ranks it 14th in U.S.
The Internet phenomenon, which boasts 80 million users worldwide, exploded in popularity over the past year as a convenient way for Web users to communicate and share personal details with selected groups of friends or acquaintances. But grammatical errors in the automated messages Facebook uses to personalize pronouns when members share information with their friends have proliferated since the site expanded from English-only into 15 new languages in recent months.
And now, Facebook will press members to declare whether they are male or female, seeking to end the grammatical device that leads the site to refer to individual users as "they" or "themself." "We’ve gotten feedback from translators and users in other countries that translations wind up being too confusing when people have not specified a sex on their profiles," Facebook product manager Naomi Gleit said in a company statement.
In English, when users fail to specify what gender they are, Facebook defaults to some form of the gender neutral, plural pronoun "they." That option is unavailable when the plural is always masculine or feminine in other languages. "People who haven’t selected what sex they are frequently get defaulted to the wrong sex," Gleit wrote.
Unless the gender of the user is clear, Facebook does not know which pronoun to use to notify other members add information to the site. This common English problem is multiplied in languages where masculine and feminine distinctions are grammatically ingrained.
The site will now ask users to specify whether they are male or female on their basic member- ship profile. It will prompt existing users to define themselves. Facebook has an opt-out option for members who choose not to specify their gender or do not consider gender to be clear cut. Members can remove mention of gender from messages about their activities. "We’ve received pushback in the past from groups that find the male/female distinction too limiting," Gleit said.
What does the word "traffic" (Line3, Paragraph1) most probably mean

A:The number of visits to a certain website. B:The change of website rankings. C:The amount of profit a website able to generate annually. D:The trend in communication industry.

The "MyDoom" virus could presage a generation of computer attacks by organised gangs aiming to extract ransoms from online businesses, experts said yesterday.
The warning came as the website run by SCO, a company that sells Unix computer software, in effect disappeared from the web under a blizzard of automated attacks from PCs infected by the virus, which first appeared a week ago.
The "MyDoom-A" version of the virus is reckoned to be the worst to have hit the internet, in terms of the speed of its spread, with millions of PCs worldwide believed to be infected. Such "zombie" machines begin to send out hundreds of copies of the virus every hour to almost any e-mail address in their files.
On Sunday they began sending automated queries to SCO’s website, an attack that will continue until 12 February. The attack is the web equivalent of ringing the company’s doorbell and running away a million times a second, leaving its computers unable to deal with standard requests to view its pages.
"You have to wonder about the time limit," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at the antivirus company Sophos. "Someone could go to SCO after the 12th and say, ’If you don’t want this to happen again, here are our demands’." Raimund Genes, European president of the security software firm Trend Micro, said: "Such a programme could take out any major website on the internet. It’s not terrorism, but it is somebody who is obviously upset with SCO"
SCO has earned the enmity of computer users through a lawsuit it has filed against IBM. SCO claims ownership of computer code it says IBM put into the free operating system Linux, and is demanding licence fees and damages of $1bn.
Mr. Cluley said: "It might be that whoever is behind this will say to SCO, ’if you don’t want the next one to target you, drop the lawsuit’." SCO has offered $250,000 (£140,000) for information leading to the arrest of the person or people who wrote and distributed MyDoom.
Nell Barrett, of the security company Information Risk Management, said, "I would give a lot of credence to the idea of gangs using viruses to extort money. It’s hard for law enforcement to track them down, because they’re using machines owned by innocent people."
A second variant of MyDoom will start attacking part of Microsoft’s website later today. The antivirus company MessageLabs said it had blocked more than 16 million copies of the virus in transit over the net so far. But millions more will have reached their targets.
The onset of a new generation of computer attacks was marked by ______.

A:an organization of gangs B:the infection of PCs C:the sale of a software D:a website’s vanishing

According to comScore, Facebook is the leading social networking site based on monthly unique visitors, having overtaken main competitor MySpace in April 2008. According to Alexa, the website’s ranking among all websites increased from 60th to 7th in terms of worldwide traffic, from September 2006 to September 2007, and is currently 5th. Quantcast ranks the website 15th in U.S. in terms of traffic, and Compete. com ranks it 14th in U.S.
The Internet phenomenon, which boasts 80 million users worldwide, exploded in popularity over the past year as a convenient way for Web users to communicate and share personal details with selected groups of friends or acquaintances. But grammatical errors in the automated messages Facebook uses to personalize pronouns when members share information with their friends have proliferated since the site expanded from English-only into 15 new languages in recent months.
And now, Facebook will press members to declare whether they are male or female, seeking to end the grammatical device that leads the site to refer to individual users as "they" or "themself." "We’ve gotten feedback from translators and users in other countries that translations wind up being too confusing when people have not specified a sex on their profiles," Facebook product manager Naomi Gleit said in a company statement.
In English, when users fail to specify what gender they are, Facebook defaults to some form of the gender neutral, plural pronoun "they." That option is unavailable when the plural is always masculine or feminine in other languages. "People who haven’t selected what sex they are frequently get defaulted to the wrong sex," Gleit wrote.
Unless the gender of the user is clear, Facebook does not know which pronoun to use to notify other members add information to the site. This common English problem is multiplied in languages where masculine and feminine distinctions are grammatically ingrained.
The site will now ask users to specify whether they are male or female on their basic member- ship profile. It will prompt existing users to define themselves. Facebook has an opt-out option for members who choose not to specify their gender or do not consider gender to be clear cut. Members can remove mention of gender from messages about their activities. "We’ve received pushback in the past from groups that find the male/female distinction too limiting," Gleit said.

What does the word "traffic" (Line3, Paragraph1) most probably mean()

A:The number of visits to a certain website. B:The change of website rankings. C:The amount of profit a website able to generate annually. D:The trend in communication industry.


Part A
Directions:
Read the following four texts. Answer the questions below each text by choosing A, B, C or D. Mark your answers on ANSWER SHEET 1. (40 points)
Text 1

Like the look of our website Whatever the answer, the chances are you made your mind up within the first twentieth of a second. A study by researchers in Canada has shown that the snap decisions Internet users make about the quality of a web page have a lasting impact on their opinions.
We all know that first impressions count, but this study shows that the brain can make flash judgments almost as fast as the eye can take in the information. "My colleagues believed it would be impossible to really see anything in less than 500 milliseconds," says Gitte Lindgaard of Carleton University in Ottawa. Instead they found that impressions were made in the first 50 milliseconds of viewing.
Lindgaard and her team presented volunteers with the briefest glimpses of web pages previously rated as being either easy on the eye or particularly unpleasant, and asked them to rate the websites on a sliding scale of visual appeal. Even though the images flashed up for just 50 milliseconds, roughly the duration of a single frame of standard television shot, their decisions tallied well with judgments made after a longer period of examination.
In the crowded and competitive world of the web, companies hoping to make millions from e-commerce should take notice." Unless the first impression is favorable, visitors will be out of your site before they even know that you might be offering more than your competitors," Lindgaard warns.
For a typical commercial website, 60% of traffic comes from search engines such as Google. This makes a user’s first impression even more critical. The lasting effect of first impressions is known to psychologists as the "halo effect": if you can snare people with an attractive design, they are more likely to overlook other minor faults with the site, and may rate its actual content more favorably.
This is because of "cognitive bias". People enjoy being right, so continuing to use a website that gave a good first impression helps to "prove" to themselves that they made a good initial decision. "It’s awfully scary stuff, but the tendency to jump to conclusions is far more widespread than we realize".
These days, enlightened web users want to see a "puritan" approach. It’s about getting information across in the quickest, simplest way possible. For this reason, many commercial websites now follow a fairly regular set of rules. For example, westerners tend to look at the top-left corner of a page first, so that’s where the company logo should go. And most users also expect to see a search function in the top right.
Of course, the other golden rule is to make sure that your web pages load quickly, otherwise your customers might not stick around long enough to make that coveted first impression. "That can be the difference between big business and no business".
Which of the following websites is most unlikely to be successful

A:a website with a lot of pictures of large size. B:a website that puts the logo of the company on the top-left corner. C:a website which can provide a clear outline in a simple design. D:a website with an appearance that can make your eyes comfortable.

The challenge that newspapers faced from the website is

A:the small text-ads that appear alongside search engines. B:the localization of website and more elaborate service. C:the display ads. D:the classified ads.

Text 3

The "MyDoom" virus could presage a generation of computer attacks by organised gangs aiming to extract ransoms from online businesses, experts said yesterday.
The warning came as the website run by SCO, a company that sells Unix computer software, in effect disappeared from the web under a blizzard of automated attacks from PCs infected by the virus, which first appeared a week ago.
The "MyDoom-A" version of the virus is reckoned to be the worst to have hit the internet, in terms of the speed of its spread, with millions of PCs worldwide believed to be infected. Such "zombie" machines begin to send out hundreds of copies of the virus every hour to almost any e-mail address in their files.
On Sunday they began sending automated queries to SCO’s website, an attack that will continue until 12 February. The attack is the web equivalent of ringing the company’s doorbell and running away a million times a second, leaving its computers unable to deal with standard requests to view its pages.
"You have to wonder about the time limit," said Graham Cluley, senior technology consultant at the antivirus company Sophos. "Someone could go to SCO after the 12th and say, ’If you don’t want this to happen again, here are our demands’." Raimund Genes, European president of the security software firm Trend Micro, said: "Such a programme could take out any major website on the internet. It’s not terrorism, but it is somebody who is obviously upset with SCO"
SCO has earned the enmity of computer users through a lawsuit it has filed against IBM. SCO claims ownership of computer code it says IBM put into the free operating system Linux, and is demanding licence fees and damages of $1bn.
Mr. Cluley said: "It might be that whoever is behind this will say to SCO, ’if you don’t want the next one to target you, drop the lawsuit’." SCO has offered $250,000 (£140,000) for information leading to the arrest of the person or people who wrote and distributed MyDoom.
Nell Barrett, of the security company Information Risk Management, said, "I would give a lot of credence to the idea of gangs using viruses to extort money. It’s hard for law enforcement to track them down, because they’re using machines owned by innocent people."
A second variant of MyDoom will start attacking part of Microsoft’s website later today. The antivirus company MessageLabs said it had blocked more than 16 million copies of the virus in transit over the net so far. But millions more will have reached their targets.
The onset of a new generation of computer attacks was marked by ______.

A:an organization of gangs B:the infection of PCs C:the sale of a software D:a website’s vanishing

According to comScore, Facebook is the leading social networking site based on monthly unique visitors, having overtaken main competitor MySpace in April 2008. According to Alexa, the website’s ranking among all websites increased from 60th to 7th in terms of worldwide traffic, from September 2006 to September 2007, and is currently 5th. Quantcast ranks the website 15th in U.S. in terms of traffic, and Compete. com ranks it 14th in U.S.
The Internet phenomenon, which boasts 80 million users worldwide, exploded in popularity over the past year as a convenient way for Web users to communicate and share personal details with selected groups of friends or acquaintances. But grammatical errors in the automated messages Facebook uses to personalize pronouns when members share information with their friends have proliferated since the site expanded from English-only into 15 new languages in recent months.
And now, Facebook will press members to declare whether they are male or female, seeking to end the grammatical device that leads the site to refer to individual users as "they" or "themself." "We’ve gotten feedback from translators and users in other countries that translations wind up being too confusing when people have not specified a sex on their profiles," Facebook product manager Naomi Gleit said in a company statement.
In English, when users fail to specify what gender they are, Facebook defaults to some form of the gender neutral, plural pronoun "they." That option is unavailable when the plural is always masculine or feminine in other languages. "People who haven’t selected what sex they are frequently get defaulted to the wrong sex," Gleit wrote.
Unless the gender of the user is clear, Facebook does not know which pronoun to use to notify other members add information to the site. This common English problem is multiplied in languages where masculine and feminine distinctions are grammatically ingrained.
The site will now ask users to specify whether they are male or female on their basic member- ship profile. It will prompt existing users to define themselves. Facebook has an opt-out option for members who choose not to specify their gender or do not consider gender to be clear cut. Members can remove mention of gender from messages about their activities. "We’ve received pushback in the past from groups that find the male/female distinction too limiting," Gleit said.

What does the word "traffic" (Line3, Paragraph1) most probably mean()

A:The number of visits to a certain website B:The change of website rankings C:The amount of profit a website able to generate annually D:The trend in communication industry

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