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  3. eBay eBay is a global phenomenon—the world’s largest garage sale, online shopping center, car dealer and auction site with 1

eBay eBay is a global phenomenon—the world’s largest garage sale, online shopping center, car dealer and auction site with 1

admin2009-04-23  85
问题                                               eBay
    eBay is a global phenomenon—the world’s largest garage sale, online shopping center, car dealer and auction site with 147 million registered users in 30 countries as of March 2005. You can find everything from encyclopedias to olives to snow boots to stereos to airplanes for sale. And if you stumble on it before the eBay overseers do, you might even find a human kidney or a virtual date.
    eBay is, first and foremost, an online auction site. You can browse through categories like Antiques, Boats, Clothing & Accessories, Computers & Networking, Jewelry & Watches and Video Games. When you see something you like, you click on the auction title and view the details, including pictures, descriptions, payment options and shipping information. If you have a pretty good idea of what you’re looking for, you can search for it using simple keywords, such as "Apple iPod", or using more advanced search criteria that helps narrow the results, such as keywords to exclude, item location, price range and accepted payment methods.
    If you place a bid on an item, you enter a contractual agreement to buy it if you win the auction. All auctions have minimum starting bids, and some have a reserve price—a secret minimum amount the selle is willing to accept for the item. If the bidding doesn’t reach the reserve price, the seller doesn’t have to part with the item. In addition to auctions, you can find tons of fixed-price items on eBay that make shopping there just like shopping at any other online marketplace. You see what you like, you buy it, you pay for it and you wait for it to arrive at your door. There axe also auction listings that give you the option to "Buy It Now" for a price that’s typically higher than the auction’s start price. If you choose to buy the item for the "Buy It Now" price instead of bidding on it, the auction ends instantly and the item is yours.
    You can pay for an item on eBay using a variety of methods, including money order, cashier’s check, cash, personal check and electronic payment services like PayPal and BidPay. It’s up to each seller to decide which payment methods he’ll accept. PayPal is the easiest way to buy something on eBay, because eBay owns PayPal. The PayPal payment process is already built into any auction listing on eBay.
    Just as you can buy almost anything on eBay, you can sell almost anything, too. Using a simple listing process, you can put all of the junk in your basement up for sale to the highest bidder. Lots of people sell their old laptop(携式电脑) once they’ve upgraded, the clothing their kids have grown out of or the brand new couch they bought on final sale without realizing it wouldn’t fit in their den. Some people even make a business of eBay by opening their own "eBay store". When you sell an item on eBay, you pay listing fees and turn over a percentage of the final sale price to eBay.
    Once you register (for free) with eBay, you can access all of your eBay buying and selling activities in a single location called "My eBay".
    To look for an item, you don’t need to register—you can browse, search and watch items (up to 10) as a guest. You can’t bid or buy as a guest, though. So the next step is to register with eBay here. It’s quick and free.
    Now we can place a bid on the set of Simpsons Pez dispensers. If we click on the link in our watch list, we end up back at the auction page. There are four main sections to any auction page:
    -Title/Overview—This is where you see the basic information, like auction title, price, shipping price, seller information and how many bids have been placed so far.
    -Description—This is where the seller provides details about the item.
    -Shipping, payment and return policy —This is where you can find full shipping information, any details the seller wants a bidder to know about making payment(including which methods are accepted) and what the seller’s return policy is.
    -Bidding —This is where you place a bid on the item.
    eBay’s bidding process works like this: You enter the maximum amount you are willing to pay for the item, and eBay bids incrementally(增加) on your behalf until the bidding reaches the maximum amount you entered. So if we decide we are willing to pay $2.00 for this set of Pez dispensers, we enter $2.00 in the bid slot.
    When we click "Place bid", the next screen is a confirmation screen where we can see the bid price and commit to it. Once we place and confirm our bid, here’s what the auction page looks like:
    The top portion of the page with the blue background is for our eyes only no one else can see what our maximum bid is. Why is the current price $0.99 and not $2.00? It’s because when you’re the first bidder, no matter what you enter as your maximum price, your first bid is always the starting price. If someone bids against us, eBay will bid on our behalf up to $2.00 in $0.05 increments (low-price auctions use very small increments, while high price auctions use larger increments). So if another user comes along and enters $1.25 as his maximum, eBay will bid $1.31 on our behalf, and we’ll still be winning. But if another user places a maximum bid of $ 2.01, we’ve been outbid and eBay will send us an e-mail to this effect in case we’re not watching the auction. At this point, if we still want these Pez dispensers, we have to enter a new maximum bid.
    This is where eBay’s bidding process doesn’t work exactly like it’s supposed to and starts to get exciting. If every bidder truly entered the maximum he was willing to pay, auctions would end with little fanfare(炫耀). The person who entered the highest maximum bid would quietly win. But humans being human, the actual maximum amount they’re willing to pay is usually "a tiny bit more than what everyone who’s bidding against me is willing to pay." If we still want our Pez dispensers, we’ll enter a new maximum bid of, say, $3.00; and as long as the other bidder’s maximum amount is less than $3.00, we’ll be winning the auction again. Our coup(妙计) might be temporary, though, because if the other bidder wants these Pez dispensers as much as we do, he’s going to bid again until he outbids our maximum. And now we have a bidding war.
    Bidding wars are a rush and they’re sometimes very expensive. If this war continues for the three days until the auction ends, we could end up paying a hundred bucks for these Pez dispensers. It happens. The adrenaline(肾上腺素) takes over and people start bidding to win—net necessarily to win a few Pez dispensers, just to WIN. For this reason, most of the bidding happens in the last two minutes of an auction. People wait to place a bid until an auction is about to close—in this way, they can catch other bidders off guard, and hopefully no one will get the chance to outbid them. The last 10 seconds of a bidding war often becomes a battle of bandwidth. Someone using a dial-up connection will never be able to place a winning bid in 10 seconds. Someone using a cable modem can place a winning bid in two seconds.
    There is at least one reason why someone would place a bid very early in the auction to remove a "Buy It Now" option. Remember that when an auction item also has a "Buy It Now" option, if someone decides to "Buy It Now" the auction is over. But the opposite is also true As soon as someone bids on the item, the "Buy It Now" option disappears. If someone comes across an item she wants but she’s not willing to pay the "Buy It Now" price, she’ll enter the minimum starting bid just so another user doesn’t come along and buy it out from under her.
选项 A、Y
B、N
C、NG
答案B
解析 由题干关键词human kidney可将答案定位至第一段第三句。And if you stumble on it be tore the eBay overseers do，you might even find a human kidney or a virtual date．如果你能赶在eBay监督员之前浏览，也许还会发现人的肾脏或者虚拟约会。这意味着eBay是不允许出售人体器官的，因此本题陈述错误。
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