预习！英创教育8月30日早读分享

英创教育「早鸟早读」计划第【3259】天明早8:30不见不散！??

Part 1 – HolidaysQ: Where did you go for your last holiday?Well, actually, I just got back from my last holiday. I went for 10 days to Greece, Andit was absolutely incredible.It was an incredible trip. We went with a couple of friends of ours, and one ofthose friends is Greek, and so she was able to show us around and kind of give usthe hidden gems. We didn"t have to go to all of the tourist traps. So we reallyenjoyed it.We had great food and just a very enjoyable time.Q: Do you like holidays?Yeah, I do like holidays. I don"t like my holidays to last for too long, which is kindof a controversial opinion, I think, because lots of people like to go on holiday just,just endlessly and just totally relax.I find that I get a little bit bored, and I look forward to going back to work, aftermaybe five or six days. But I really, really like short holidays, like four or five days,just to unwind a little bit.Q: What do you do on holidays?Well, it depends where I am, really. If I"m taking a city break, then it"s a lot of kindof walking around the city and a lot of drinking coffees and eating different typesof cakes and desserts and trying all of the local food.If it"s more like a beach holiday on an island or somewhere by the coast, then I"llgo swimming. Also having lots of coffees, and lots of pieces of cake. Yeah, actually,maybe I should say that it"s just a coffee and cake trip.Right. Rather than a holiday, because that"s always true.Q: Do you prefer a leisurely or a busy holiday?I think it"s nice to have a little bit of a mix. You don"t want to be on, the go everyday, because then if you"re just constantly going from place to place, you"ll bemore tired when you get back than you were when you left.But also, like I said, I do tend to get a little bit bored, and if we"re just doing thesame thing day after day, so a mix of both is good for me.Part 2 – A Second-Hand WebsiteDescribe a website that sells second-hand items.Well, I think the most famous website, at least the most famous in the UK and theUS that sells second hand items is eBay. So eBay first became popular I think inmaybe the late 1990s or the early 2000s, although I"m not totally sure about thedates.And it was famous as a place where you could go and bid on different items. So itwasn"t like Amazon is today or other similar marketplaces where you go and yousee the price, you see if it"s in stock and then you click to buy and then it"s sent toyou. Instead, there was a process where you would put a bid on something andlet"s say if the recommended price was five pounds, you might put a bid on forthree pounds or four pounds, but then somebody else might put in a bid for ￡4.50and then you might put ￡5.And so it became like an auction. And in some ways that was quite advantageousbecause if it was an unusual item, a special item, or an item that was quite rare insome way, then you had the chance of getting it at a really low cost and actuallygetting a really good bargain.I think the reason that eBay didn"t become hugely successful the way that Amazonis hugely successful is because most people don"t have the time to be putting inbids and doing auctions and things. It"s quite exciting for individual items, butwhen you just need something quite normal, quite standard, and you want to get itonline, it"s easier just to see the price and buy.How I found out about it, it was very famous. They put lots of adverts in, on the TV,in newspapers, in magazines, on the Internet at the time. So I think in the early2000s almost everyone in the UK would have heard of eBay.It was extremely famous and in terms of whether I like it or not, I don"t use itnowadays, because it"s much less popular than it used to be. I liked it at the time,but again only for buying unusual items. I wasn"t really keen on the process ofbidding for a normal everyday item that was just something quite standar▼IDE英创教育