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Selling Expertise on the Internet for Extra Cash Teresa Estes, a licensed mental-health counselor, watched as business at he

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问题     Selling Expertise on the Internet for Extra Cash
    Teresa Estes, a licensed mental-health counselor, watched as business at her private practice decreased last year. Then the single mother turned to her keyboard to boost her income.
    Ms. Estes applied to become an "expert" on Live Person Inc., a Web site where clients pay for online chat time with professionals and advisers of all fields. For $ 1.89 a minute — a rate she set — the 39-year-old from Marianna, Fla., dispenses advice to clients around the globe. She spends about four hours a day online, often at night, when her daughter has gone to bed.
    "It was the economy," she says of her move to take her skills online. "Live Person is more profitable than my private practice." Ms. Estes had charged her private clients up to $ 75 an hour.
    As the recession(经济衰退)deepens, a small but growing number of people are taking their skills online, offering expertise or performing specified tasks for a fee. Labor-at-the-keyboard sites are gaining popularity as people increasingly turn to the Web in search of work. Internet job-search sites saw a 51% rise in traffic from January 2008 to January 2009, according to comscore Media Metrix, to 26.7 million unique visitors.
    Among the many fee-for-service Web sites out there, at least three are attracting a significant number of users — though consumers should exercise a healthy degree of skepticism(怀疑态度)when consulting any of these sites. Live Person seeks out experts on a slew of topics, including mental health, financial services, shopping and fashion, as well as psychics and spiritual advisers. Mechanical Turk, a Web service run by Amazon.com Inc., pays workers to perform tasks, such as cataloging products online. Associated Content pays contributors to write articles on a wide range of subjects, from organic flower gardening to how to apply for financial aid.
    Live Person went public in 2001, and the current version of the site was launched in late 2007. Today, the site has 30,000 registered experts, attracting an average of 100,000 people a year who pay for the offered services, says Chief Executive Officer Robert Locascio. Roughly 3,500 people have made contributing to the site their full-time job, he says.
    Associated Content reviews submissions in house and then decides how much to pay for them. The site, which specializes in how-to pieces and feature stories on news topics, had 237, 000 registered contributors and more than one million content pieces as of February, both about double from the same month a year ago.
    Sabah Karimi, a 26-year-old fromOrlando, Fla., left a career in marketing to become a full-time freelance writer and now spends between 8 and 10 hours a week writing for Associated Content. She has been at it for about three years and says she earns roughly $ 1,000 a month from her past and current submissions.
    Mechanical Turk is based on "crowd sourcing" , or breaking a task into lots of tiny pieces and giving it to a big group of people to complete quickly. Most of these jobs — which the site calls HITs, for human intelligence tasks — pay just a few cents. Efficient Mturkers, as they call themselves, can make more than $ 100 a week doing things such as finding someone ’ s email address or labeling images of a particular animal in a photograph.
Mechanical Turk originated as a method to______.
选项 A、label images of a particular animal in a photograph
B、serve a variety of companies who need Web tasks performed
C、help Amazon manage its product database
D、find someone’ s email address
答案B
解析
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