Passage 1

Imagine a Hollywood movie with this plot: Lily Yang, a young widow, leaves Taiwan and immigrates to the United States, hoping her son Chih-Yuan will have a better life there. After the family settles in California, Chih-Yuan changes his first name to Jerry and heads off to school, knowing only one word of English, the word “shoe.” Jerry learns English quickly; he is exceptionally bright and becomes a straight-A student. When he graduates from high school, he wins a scholarship to a top university, where he becomes friends with David Filo, a fellow student. Together Jerry and David start an Internet company that makes them both billionaires within five years.

If you think this could happen only in a Hollywood movie, you are wrong. It could happen in California’s Silicon Valley. And it did.

In 1993, Jerry Yang and David Filo were studying for their doctorates in electrical engineering at Stanford University in California. They did their work side by side at desks that the university provided for them. But when they sat down at their computers, they often found themselves “surfing the Web”—looking for interesting sites on the Internet, which was new then—instead of working, like two kids watching TV rather than doing their homework.

Jerry and David thought the Internet was fascinating and at the same time frustrating. They were constantly asking each other, “Hey—where was that cool page we saw the other day?” Sometimes it would take them hours to find a Web site again. The problem was this: The only way to get to an Internet site was to type in its exact address (called its url, for “universal resource locator”). A url could be a long string of numbers and letters like this: http://www.wnn.or.jp/wnn-t/index_e.html. If the address was not perfectly right—if one letter was left out or one dot was misplaced—it was impossible to get to that Web site. Imagine a library with no card catalog. The only way to find a book would be to know exactly where it was. That was the state of the Internet in 1993.

David developed software so that Jerry could compile a list of their favorite Web sites; that way, they could revisit them whenever they wanted to. Jerry kept adding sites to the list, and it quickly got so long that it needed to be organized. Jerry thought back to a part-time job he’d had shelving books in the university library. He remembered how the books were organized into categories and subcategories, and he decided to organize his list of Web sites in the same way. “Sports,” for example, became one category, with subcategories like “sumo wrestling” and “basketball.”

Jerry called the list “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” and posted it on the Internet in the spring of 1994. Friends told friends about “Jerry’s Guide,” and the number of people viewing it doubled every month—from hundreds, to thousands, to hundreds of thousands. Telephone calls and e-mail suggesting sites to add were coming in faster than Jerry and David could handle them. Jerry and David abandoned their studies altogether and started working 20 hours a day on Jerry’s list, often sleeping on the floor next to their computers. Their hobby had become an obsession. Late one night, Jerry and David began talking about changing the name of the Web site. “Jerry’s Guide to the World Wide Web” no longer seemed appropriate, as David was working on the site as much as Jerry. They flipped through a dictionary, looking for possible new names, and came across the word yahoo. The dictionary gave two definitions of the word: “a rough or noisy person” and “a word shouted when you find something you’re excited about.” They liked the word—they thought it reflected the Wild West nature of the Internet. Just for fun, they added an exclamation point. Yahoo!, they thought, was a name people would remember. Indeed it was.

By the end of 1994, the Yahoo! Web site was getting one million hits a day, and Stanford’s computer system was crashing under the strain. University officials told Jerry and David they would have to move their hobby off campus. When word got out that Yahoo! was looking for a new home, Jerry and David got job offers from several giant telecommunications companies. The offer they finally accepted, however, was not a job offer, but an offer of money. A venture capitalist gave Jerry and David $1 million to start their own business. In exchange, he took a 25 percent stake in Yahoo! Yahoo!, the corporation, was born.

When Yahoo! officially opened for business, its corporate offices were typical for an Internet start-up company. Newspaper accounts from 1995 gave this description: All the office furniture is purple and yellow, the official corporate colors. In purple-painted cubicles, 16 employees, called “surfers,” sit in front of computers and review Web site submissions, rejecting some and deciding where to put the ones they accept. All of the surfers are in their early 20s, wear T-shirts, and park their bicycles next to their desks. From time to time, David Filo, barefoot and wearing torn jeans, emerges from his office, which is cluttered with old newspapers, CDs, a pair of purple roller blades, and crumpled Coke cans. Often David doesn’t leave Yahoo! headquarters for days—he sleeps under his desk—and when he does leave, he drives away in a dilapidated 1981 Datsun, its tailpipe dragging on the ground. To top it off, Jerry and David carry business cards that identify their positions in the company as the “Chief Yahoos.”

But the Chief Yahoos knew what they were doing. Their competitors were in a race to develop powerful technology to collect as many Internet sites as possible for their directories. Some even used robot computers, called “spiders,” that searched the Internet day and night, looking for new sites. Yahoo! thought its competitors were on the wrong track. Jerry and David suspected that people didn’t necessarily want access to every site on the Internet; they needed help sorting through all the sites that were out there. That is what Yahoo! would do. Instead of buying robot computers, Yahoo! hired more people. People, not software programs, would choose Web sites for the Yahoo! directory and put them in the appropriate categories. The final work would always be done by humans.

Jerry and David’s instincts were right. Yahoo! became the most popular site on the World Wide Web, attracting 100 million people a month. These were the huge numbers advertisers wanted, and corporations started paying millions for advertising spots on the Yahoo! site. Yahoo! was a gold mine, and Jerry and David had struck it rich.

In the past few years, Yahoo!’s fortunes have been up and down, but Jerry Yang and David Filo don’t seem to care much whether they personally make or lose money. All that matters is Yahoo! itself. Even after Yahoo! made them millionaires, their lives didn’t change much: David still drove his old Datsun, and Jerry still dressed like a student, wearing Levi jeans and a green plastic Yahoo! watch. They still worked long hours, too. Jerry told a newspapers reporter, “Yahoo! is such a big part of my life that I don’t think of this as a job.” Yahoo! has become a billion dollar corporation, but to David and Jerry it will always be what it was in 1993—a hobby and an obsession.

Lily Yang immigrated to the US because ________.

When Jerry first went to school in the US, ________.

When Jerry and David started surfing the Internet, ________.

The author states that Jerry and David’s hobby became an obsession because ________.

Jerry and David’s competitors were on the wrong track because ________.

Which of the following best describes Jerry and David’s attitude towards profit making in their company?