备战2012年BEC高级精讲第8讲讲义
第5页：Oral Practice
Oral Practice
u What’s the influence of online shopping to Chinese customers?
ü 思路拓展
Positive influence
convenience: save time, energy and money, ease of judging products at one place
Negative influence
Online transaction might not be the safest way. Customers cannot see the product and therefore cannot assure themselves of the quality of the product. Also, online transaction takes the form of cash card and entering their pin numbers. Thus, some online credit card fraud takes place.
ü 实践操作
Basically, I think online shopping brings more benefits to Chinese customers. We enjoy more convenience from online shopping. We can save our time and energy from choosing similar products at different places. Online shopping provides the ease of judging products at one place. Also, online products usually are cheaper than those sold on the market due to its shorter distribution channel. On the other hand, customers may take the risk of not ensuring the quality and credit card fraud.
Online shopping reading passage
A beginner’s guide to e-commerce
E-commerce means electronic commerce, or simply, buying and selling stuff on the Internet. It has only been with us since the mid-90s, but it is already a multi-billion dollar market, and it is growing fast. But many people still have doubts about it. Does it work? Is it difficult? What can you buy? Is it safe?
The answer to the first question is definitely YES. In North America, nearly 20 million people shopped online in December 2000, spending a total of $6.1 billion. This is almost the same amount as online shoppers in the Asia-Pacific region spent in the whole year ($7 billion), but in Asia the market is growing much faster, by about 150% a year. More and more people are realizing that with online shopping, they can:
u shop at their convenience, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
u search large catalogs, and get much more information about a product
u compare products and sellers
u customize their order (make special orders) easily
u add to their order over several days.
Is e-commerce difficult? NO: if you can use a computer, you can shop online. You need to have Internet access, and generally, you need a credit card. Then all you have to do is find what you are looking for, and buy it!
What can you buy? ANYTHING that you can buy in a store. The most popular items are computer products, books, music, home electronics, clothes, gifts and flowers, travel tickets, and toys, but you can also buy groceries, pets, a house, and millions of other things. Then all you have to do is wait – sometimes only a few hours – until the company delivers what you bought.
Is e-commerce safe? YES and NO. Online sellers are very careful to protect their customers, and they use encryption technology to keep your credit card information safe. They also promise to keep all your information secret and not to sell it to other companies. However, hackers have stolen credit card numbers in the past and broken into “secure” websites. But this is rare, and perhaps the biggest danger of online shopping is that you will spend too much money!
E-commerce is still young, and there are still some problems to work out, but it is definitely here to stay.
encrypt verb [transitive]
to protect information by putting it into a special code that only some people can read, especially information that is on a computer 译成密码
encryption noun [uncountable]
secure encryption of data
encrypted adjective
files stored in encrypted form
