阅读理解

 Directions: In this section, there is a short passage followed by 5 questions. Read the passage carefully and then give brief answers to the questions below in the fewest words possible. 

Passage 8

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 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 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 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. 

问答题 Apart from a series of fortunate events, what is it that has made Google so successful?
【正确答案】The brilliance of S. Brin and L. Page also made Google so successful.
【答案解析】根据第二段的第一句话“Google owes much of its success to the brilliance of S. Brin and L. Page. . . ” 可知答案。
问答题 What is the origin of Google’ s search engine started by L. Page?
【正确答案】Google’ s search engine originated from the academic project.
【答案解析】第二段的第二句话讲到Page开始写的学术项目最终成为Google的搜索引擎。 
问答题 How did Google’ s search engine spread all over the world?
【正确答案】Google’ s search engine spread all over the world by word of mouth.
【答案解析】第二段的最后一句说到他们的搜索引擎是通过口头相传来传播的。
问答题 Why did Brin and Page decide to set up their own business?
【正确答案】Because other search engines could meet their price.
【答案解析】第三段的最后一句讲到他们建立自己公司的原因是其他公司无法提供给他们满意的价格。
问答题 Where does the revenue of the Google company come from?
【正确答案】The revenue of the Google company is largely generated from advertising.
【答案解析】根据revenue可定位到文章的最后两句, Google的收入主要是收取广告费用。