1. Do you know who these men are? Do you know what they accomplished on the Internet?
a. Mark Zuckerberg
b. Larry Page and Sergey Brin
c. Chad Hurley, Steve Chen, and Jawed Karim
2. What are some of your favorite sites to go to on the Internet? Why do you like them?
3. Do you have your own website?
FACEBOOK - A Billion Dollar Idea
What would you do if you had one million dollars? Would you buy a house? Would you travel around the world? What if you had even more money? What would you do with one billion dollars? One billion dollars i: a million dollars a thousand times! That's a lot of money. Would you ever turn down a billion dollars? Mark Zuekerberg did.
Mark Zuekerberg is the founder and CEO of Faeebook, an immensely popular soeial networking website that started in the United States. Mark was a eollcgc student at Harvard University in Cambridge. Massaehusctts when he founded the website in 2004. The now world famous website was started from Mark's dorm room. When Mark started the site, its membership was restrieted to only Harvard students. Its popularity increased and soon other schools in the northeastern United States were included. Now millions of student users visit daily and the website is one of the top ten most widely visited sites on the internet worldwide! Now, at only 23 years of age, Mark has had a ehanee to do what so many people will never have the opportunity to do - he is CEO of his own company.
College students, and now high school students, use Facebook to communicate with friends, exchange information, and share pictures. Users don't have to pay any money to create their profiles. All revenue is generated via advertising.
Many other companies have been rumored to be interested in purchasing Faccbook. Just a few years after Mai started the company, he was approached by Terry Semel who was the CEO of Yahoo! Terry offered Mark one billion dollars to sell Faccbook to Yahoo! Mark said no though and is still the owner and CEO. Mark stands behind his original intentions. He's been quoted that he knows the value of the company could decrease. However, he claims he's in this to build something incredible, not be bought out by another company.
Maybe he was smart. Now Facebook is rumored to be worth billions of dollars and bigger companies, like Microsoft, want a stake of the company. Some private investment firms are also interested. Facebook could sell for over 15 billion dollars if Mark ever decides to sell it at all. Perhaps Mark will just keep working from his Palo Alto, California office in the heart of Silicon Valley, where he moved after dropping out of Harvard University to pursue his dream of building something cool.
VOCABULARY TASKS
A. Match the word or phrase in the left column with the word or number that best describes it in the right column.
______1. million a. CEO ______2. billion b. 1,000,000 ______3. chief executive officer c. 1,000,000,000
B. Match the verbs or phrasal verbs in the left column with the best definition in the right column. (If you don't know the answer, read the short article and try to guess the answer from context.)
|
________1. turn down
________2. found
________3. exchange
________4. generate
________5. stand behind
________6. drop out
________7. pursue
|
a. produce
b. set up a company
c. quit or leave
d. follow or chase
e. reject
f. support
g. share or |
C. Answer these questions based on what you read in the main article.
1. If you generate a lot of revenue, what do you have a lot of?_____
2. If something is a rumor, is it proven true or false? Yes or No?_____
3. If something is immensely popular, how popular is it?_____
4. Is the original the first thing, the last thing, or something in the middle?_____
5. If you have stake in something, what do you have?_____
6. What is a kind of business you are likely to find in Silicon Valley?_____
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