10
E COMMERCE AND E GOVERNMENT 10.1 Vocabulary ‘neutral’ and ‘marked’ words • expressing confidence/tentativeness
A Study the words in box a. 1 Use your dictionary to find out the meanings.
2 What part of speech is each word? B Read the Hadford University handout.
1 Use your dictionary or another source to check the meanings of the highlighted phrases.
2 Which are the stressed syllables in each phrase? Which two phrases have the same stress pattern?
C Look at the pictures on the opposite page. 1 What does each picture show?
2 For each picture, discuss how e-commerce has changed the ways in which transactions or procedures can now be conducted. Use the highlighted phrases from Exercise B and words from Exercise A.
D Study the words in box b. b
E-commerce and e-government brilliant collapse enormous
huge insignificant massive minimal outstanding plummet plunge rocket significant slump soar superb tremendous
1 Check the meanings, parts of speech and stress patterns.
2 Put the words into the correct box in the table below, as in the example.
Neutral rise, increase
fall, decrease big, large good small
E Read the script from a news programme on e-commerce.
1 Use a marked word in place of each of the blue (neutral) words.
2 Look at the red phrases. How strong are they? 78 Marked rocket, soar
E-commerce or electronic commerce describes commercial transactions which take place using electronic communication methods such as the Internet. It takes many different forms, such as the sale of goods and services between businesses (B2B), or from businesses to consumers (B2C). For many retail companies, ‘bricks and mortar’ shops are being replaced by virtual storefronts on the Internet, challenging the status quo. Consumers can also sell to other consumers (C2C) using online auction sites such as eBay. These sites display the goods for sale, offer dispute resolution services in the event of disagreement and also facilitate payment collection. Governments use e-tendering for procurement (B2G) and increasingly they are using the same technologies for non-commercial transactions, such as providing government information and submitting government forms.
It’s clear that the failure of
Boo.com in the late 1990s was largely due to its technology. It’s generally accepted that their web pages were large and could not be easily downloaded by users with small amounts of bandwidth. It’s unlikely that more than a smallnumber of potential customers were able to access the site. As a result, the company’s share price fell dramatically, losing a large amount of investors’ money ($130 million).
It’s fair to say that
lastminute.com owed much of its survival to its goodwebsite design. Their pages were easily navigable and were small enough to download quickly, providing a gooduser experience, which undoubtedly contributed to the risingnumber of sales. The different products sold by the two companies may also have beena factor. While online sales of travel products grewfrom the beginning, online clothing sales took longer to grow.
a adopt bandwidth barrier billing encrypt infrastructure legislation penetration procurement regulatory security transaction trust
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