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Homework 4

Ray Sears found his old 7th grade girlfriend Gina on the Classmates.com website. They reconnected and are now married and expecting their first child together. Classmates.com allows ordinary people to easily find people from their past by searching school and military databases. It has become very popular, attracting 15 million visitors per month and ranking #20 on a top website list. To contact matches, users must pay a $36 annual subscription fee, but personal information is kept private through the site's email system. The company plans to launch workplace and instant messaging features to further help people reconnect.

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Maribel Leiva Espinoza

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0% found this document useful (0 votes)

68 views

Homework 4

Uploaded by

Maribel Leiva Espinoza

We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.

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Download as DOCX, PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd

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ENGLISH IV

READING TASK 2

Surname: ______ Date: _

I. Read the text carefully

Before facebook: Web site Chaperones 1 Classmate Reunions

By Jefferson Graham, USA TODAY.

When Ray Sears stumbled onto2 the classmate.com Web site, which promises to reunite old friends,
he found a listing for his old seventh-grade girlfriend Gina, paid the membership fee so he could
reconnect, and asked if she remembered him. “How could I forget my first love?” she replied.

Fast-forward today, where the newly married Gina Sears is expected to give birth in August
to Ray and Gina ́s first child. “This is the promise of the internet,” says Sears, 32, a security
supervisor at a Los Angeles-area shopping mall. “A simple way for the regular Joes3 to find people
from their past. It’s a really neat way of getting back in touch.”

Others apparently agree. The number of visitors to classmate tripled in 2002, making it one of the
most popular sites in the Web. It attracts 15 million visitors a month and ranks N°. 20 on Jupiter
Media Metrix´s list of top-traffic Web sites.

Making connections has been one of the most popular uses of the internet, whether by e-mail,
bulletin board, or instant messaging. But classmate.com, like many online dating sites, has figured
out a way to make people´s need to connect pay off.

Classmate is a rare dot-com success story, a profitable company with two million paying subscribers
who happily fork over4 $36 a year (just increased from $30) to reach out to former classmates,
military colleagues, even original birth parents.

How classmate works: you go to the web site and fill out forms with your schools, years attended,
and other information. Then check the database – 180,000 U.S. schools and 38,000 military units –
to see if old pals have also registered. You can see their names, but if you want to make contact, you
must first become a paying member. The contacts are made through classmates ́ private e-mail
system - personal information isn´t listed on the site.

Beyond listing schools, the military, and working the reunion markets, classmate plans to launch a
workplace version in the coming months to attract former co-workers who have since lost touch. The
site also is looking to add an instant-messaging system so visitors can chat while they’re on the site.

1 chaperones: supervises

2 stumbled onto: found by accident

3 regular joes: ordinary people

4 for over: pay

II. Read the article again. Write True or False on the spaces provided.

1. Gina didn’t remember Ray Sears when he contacted her. F_________

2. Gina and Ray are now married and starting a family. T_______

3. Classmates.com helps you find old school friends. T_______

4. You can contact your old friends for free. F_________

5. The Web site doesn’t give out your address and telephone number T________

III. Answer the questions

What did Classmates.com website offer?

The website offered people to get back in touch with their old friends.

How has the internet helped people to connect?

The use of Internet today is a very useful tool and there are different applications to get back in
touch with people from your past.

Which people are also possible to find using Classmate.com?

To police, mititares and if you are adopted you can find your biological parents

Why people become a paying member?

On that website only the person's name appears but if you want to get in touch and the
only way to do it is to pay and then you can send them an email.

What are the plans of classmate for the coming months?

They plan to launch a working platform that allows you to contact former co-workers and
also plan to implement a chat.

IV. Fill the table with the data required

Aspect Data in numbers

1. Year in which classmates.com tripled In 2002

its visitors
145 million a month
2. # of visitors per month
At Number 20
3. Place in the Jupiter Media Metrix´s
list
The cost is $ 36
4. Cost of a year subscription …
180,000 US schools and 38,000 military units
5. Database if formed by …