Politicians do it. Charities too. And now for-profit entrepreneurs are tapping the Internet to get small amounts of money from lots and lots of supporters. One part social networking and one part capital accumulation, crowd funding websites seek to harness the enthusiasm and pocket money of virtual strangers, promising them a cut of the returns. CatwalkGenius.com helps the common people to finance designers. British documentary filmmaker Franny Armstrong raised more than $450,000 ($815,000) to finance "The Age of Stupid", which she hopes will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January. People who gave 20 quids ($35) got a credit on the film’s website; those who gave £5,000 ($9,000) and up will get a percentage of the profits, if there are any. The term crowd funding derives from another neologism: crowdsourcing, i.e., outsourcing to the public jobs typically performed by employees. Want to start a T-shirt business Why not have the masses submit designs (crowdsourcing) and finance the ones they like (crowd funding) That’s what Cameesa.com is doing, in a fashion-forward knockoff of Threadless.com which generated $17 million in revenues in 2006 by having the crowd choose T-shirt designs. "If you put money down to support a design, that’s a strong indicator of actual demand," says Cameesa founder Andrew Cronk, a programmer in Chicago. Likewise, SellaBand.com connects music lovers with unsigned artists looking to record albums. Musicians have profiles with bios and songs, and as soon as they sell 5,000 shares, at $10 a pop, it’s time to head to the recording studio. In two years, more than 30,000 people have ponied up more than $2.5 million, and 25 musicians have cut or are cutting albums. So far, the average return on each $10 investment is about $2.50 from CD sales and ads. The money gets split among the artist, SellaBand and the artist’s "believers"—an apt description for those who contributed. "People become emotionally invested as part of a team," says Mark Maclaine, bassist in the British band Second Person, which in six months raised $50,000 from 741 investors and has since had its video featured on VH1 UK and MTV UK. "Right now things are going really well," says Maclaine, who is wholeheartedly pursuing music full time. "Maybe I’ll be working in Wal-Mart in a few months." But at least 741 people are betting he won’t be. According to this passage ______.
A. crowd funding means outsourcing to the public jobs typically performed by employees
B. more and more people begin to use crowd funding as a great help to their careers
C. Cameesa.com generated $17 million in revenues in 2006
D. Cameesa.com helps to connect music lovers with unsigned artists looking to record albums
Politicians do it. Charities too. And now for-profit entrepreneurs are tapping the Internet to get small amounts of money from lots and lots of supporters. One part social networking and one part capital accumulation, crowd funding websites seek to harness the enthusiasm and pocket money of virtual strangers, promising them a cut of the returns. CatwalkGenius.com helps the common people to finance designers. British documentary filmmaker Franny Armstrong raised more than $450,000 ($815,000) to finance "The Age of Stupid", which she hopes will premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January. People who gave 20 quids ($35) got a credit on the film’s website; those who gave £5,000 ($9,000) and up will get a percentage of the profits, if there are any. The term crowd funding derives from another neologism: crowdsourcing, i.e., outsourcing to the public jobs typically performed by employees. Want to start a T-shirt business Why not have the masses submit designs (crowdsourcing) and finance the ones they like (crowd funding) That’s what Cameesa.com is doing, in a fashion-forward knockoff of Threadless.com which generated $17 million in revenues in 2006 by having the crowd choose T-shirt designs. "If you put money down to support a design, that’s a strong indicator of actual demand," says Cameesa founder Andrew Cronk, a programmer in Chicago. Likewise, SellaBand.com connects music lovers with unsigned artists looking to record albums. Musicians have profiles with bios and songs, and as soon as they sell 5,000 shares, at $10 a pop, it’s time to head to the recording studio. In two years, more than 30,000 people have ponied up more than $2.5 million, and 25 musicians have cut or are cutting albums. So far, the average return on each $10 investment is about $2.50 from CD sales and ads. The money gets split among the artist, SellaBand and the artist’s "believers"—an apt description for those who contributed. "People become emotionally invested as part of a team," says Mark Maclaine, bassist in the British band Second Person, which in six months raised $50,000 from 741 investors and has since had its video featured on VH1 UK and MTV UK. "Right now things are going really well," says Maclaine, who is wholeheartedly pursuing music full time. "Maybe I’ll be working in Wal-Mart in a few months." But at least 741 people are betting he won’t be. It can be inferred from the last paragraph that ______.
A. Mark Maclaine hopes to work in Wal-Mart in a few months
B. if things goes well, Mark Maclaine will work in Wal-Mart in a few months
C. Mark Maclaine does not want to work in Wal-Mart actually
D. Mark Maclaine does not want to pursue music any more
Humanity’s greatest accomplishment of the past five decades, declared Bill Gates this week, is the reduction in the number of deaths among young children by half, to 10 million a year in 2007. The world’s most successful capitalist heaped praise on the World Health Organization (WHO), while unveiling an ambitious new global scheme to eliminate polio within a few years. For his part, the agency’s top polio man, Brace Aylward, described the fight against the disease in the language of markets: "Elimination is the venture capital of public health: the risks are huge but so too are the rewards." The use of this sort of language captures a change in public health in the past decade. The Gates Foundation, with its pots of money and businesslike approach, has transformed the bureaucratic and disheartened world of public health. It has helped revive ailing campaigns, including the fight against polio. This will now get a fresh $600m—plus, from British and German taxpayers, from the Rotary Club International, as well as from the Gates Foundation ($255m). The decline from 350,000 new cases in 1988 (when the goal of rapid polio eradication was first declared) to 2,000 cases now (chiefly in Nigeria, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan) looks like a near victory. But the final stretch is the hardest. Only one in 200 cases is readily vulnerable to early detection (as opposed to most victims of smallpox—a serious infectious disease that causes spots which leave deep marks on the skin, already eliminated). Polio is also far more infectious. Other obstacles are that the usual vaccine has not worked well in densely populated, disease-ridden central India. Researchers are now trying to find a vaccine that fits those conditions better. Neal Halsey, of Johns Hopkins University, says the "live" vaccines used commonly today must be backed up with further doses of "inac-tivated" vaccines. These need to become cheaper. The fighting in Afghanistan and Pakistan has hampered vaccination programs there. So have rumors among Muslims in northern Nigeria that the vaccination program was in fact a conspiracy to sterilize children. That allowed the polio virus to strengthen and spread. The Nigerian strain may have now reached a dozen other countries. The final push towards elimination will certainly be costly, though several recent studies suggest that it is cheaper to spend money on a big elimination effort now than to pay the price later for sustained vigilance and health costs. The prospect of a global revival is concentrating minds. That is why, despite the daunting challenges and potential donor fatigue, the world may end up making a go of elimination this time. Muslims in northern Nigeria is cited as an example to show that ______.
A. eradication of polio has been hampered by the conspiracy of Muslims
B. eradication of polio met many obstacles there
C. vaccination program was harmful to the children there
D. vaccination program strengthened and spread virus
Humanity’s greatest accomplishment of the past five decades, declared Bill Gates this week, is the reduction in the number of deaths among young children by half, to 10 million a year in 2007. The world’s most successful capitalist heaped praise on the World Health Organization (WHO), while unveiling an ambitious new global scheme to eliminate polio within a few years. For his part, the agency’s top polio man, Brace Aylward, described the fight against the disease in the language of markets: "Elimination is the venture capital of public health: the risks are huge but so too are the rewards." The use of this sort of language captures a change in public health in the past decade. The Gates Foundation, with its pots of money and businesslike approach, has transformed the bureaucratic and disheartened world of public health. It has helped revive ailing campaigns, including the fight against polio. This will now get a fresh $600m—plus, from British and German taxpayers, from the Rotary Club International, as well as from the Gates Foundation ($255m). The decline from 350,000 new cases in 1988 (when the goal of rapid polio eradication was first declared) to 2,000 cases now (chiefly in Nigeria, India, Pakistan and Afghanistan) looks like a near victory. But the final stretch is the hardest. Only one in 200 cases is readily vulnerable to early detection (as opposed to most victims of smallpox—a serious infectious disease that causes spots which leave deep marks on the skin, already eliminated). Polio is also far more infectious. Other obstacles are that the usual vaccine has not worked well in densely populated, disease-ridden central India. Researchers are now trying to find a vaccine that fits those conditions better. Neal Halsey, of Johns Hopkins University, says the "live" vaccines used commonly today must be backed up with further doses of "inac-tivated" vaccines. These need to become cheaper. The fighting in Afghanistan and Pakistan has hampered vaccination programs there. So have rumors among Muslims in northern Nigeria that the vaccination program was in fact a conspiracy to sterilize children. That allowed the polio virus to strengthen and spread. The Nigerian strain may have now reached a dozen other countries. The final push towards elimination will certainly be costly, though several recent studies suggest that it is cheaper to spend money on a big elimination effort now than to pay the price later for sustained vigilance and health costs. The prospect of a global revival is concentrating minds. That is why, despite the daunting challenges and potential donor fatigue, the world may end up making a go of elimination this time. According to Paragraph 2, a change in the world of public health refers to the fact that public health ______.
A. is more businesslike than what it used to be
B. has received pots of money from the Gates Foundation
C. is no longer bureaucratic and demoralized
D. restarts the campaigns which had slim chance of success