ENGLISH COMPREHENSION

ASSIGNMENT NO: 1

SUBMITTED TO: Ms. Fouzia Jamal

SUBMITTED BY: Omer Ishaq

ROLL NO: 2620

CLASS: BSCS-1 (Bridging)

SUBMISSION DATE: April 30, 2021

NATIONAL UNIVERSITY OF MODERN LANGUAGES

Department of Computer Science
Read carefully the following passage and answer the questions that follow. Apply the
reading techniques for better comprehension. (Marks 10)

You know that you're doing something big
when your company name becomes a verb.
Ask Xerox. In 1959 they created the first plain
paper copy machine. It was one of the most
successful products ever. The company name
Xerox grew into a verb that means "to copy,"
as in "Bob, can you Xerox this for me?"
Around 50 years later, the same thing
happened to Google. Their company name
grew into a verb that means "to do an internet
search." Now everyone and their grandma
know what it means to Google it.
Google was the first search engine that began
considering links. Links are those blue
underlined words that take you to other pages
when you click on them. Larry Page,
cofounder of Google, believed that meaningful
data could be drawn from how those links
connect. Page figured that websites with many
links pointing at them were more important
than those that had few. He was right. Google's
search results were much better than their
rivals. They would soon become the world's
most used search engine.

Unlike Xerox, Google wasn't the first It wasn't just the great search results that led to
company to invent their product, not by a long Google becoming so well liked. It also had to
shot. Lycos released their search engine in do with the way that they presented their
1993. Yahoo! came out in 1994. AltaVista product. Most of the other search engines were
began serving results in 1995. Google did not cluttered. Their home pages were filled with
come out until years later, in 1998. Though a everything from news stories to stock quotes.
few years difference may not seem like much, But Google's homepage was, and still is, clean.
this is a major head start in the fast-moving There's nothing on it but the logo, the search
world of tech. So how did Google do it? How box, and a few links. It almost appears empty.
did they overtake their competitors who had In fact, when they were first testing it, users
such huge leads in time and money? Maybe would wait at the home page and not do
one good idea made all the difference. anything. When asked why, they said that they
were, "waiting for the rest of the page to load."
There are millions and millions of sites on the People couldn't imagine such a clean and open
internet. How does a search engine know page as being complete. But the fresh design
which ones are relevant to your search? This is grew on people once they got used to it.
a question that great minds have been working
on for decades. To understand how Google These days Google has its hands in everything
changed the game, you need to know how from self-driving cars to helping humans live
search engines worked in 1998. Back then longer. Though they have many other popular
most websites looked at the words in your products, they will always be best known for
query. They counted how many times those their search engine. The Google search engine
words appeared on each page. Then they might has changed our lives and our language. Not
return pages where the words in your query only is it a fantastic product, it is a standing
appeared the most. This system did not work example that one good idea (and a lot of hard
well & people often had to click through pages work) can change the world.
and pages of results to find what they want.
Question 1: What can readers learn about Google's approach to doing business based
on reading this article? Use information from the text to support your response.

Answer: After reading this article, readers can get the information that Google’s approach to
do business is based upon a product that provide its users, a simple and basic user interface
and more efficient and effective results as compared with other competitors.

Question 2: Explain how Google was able to overcome its competitors. Cite information
from the text to support your response.

Answer: Google overcame its rivals by providing users with better search results with the
help of using links. Web pages with required information usually have more links associated
with them, thus indicating the user links to the page, which can help in finding an effective
query result as compared with other search engines, which return results, where users have
to search through multiple pages to find what they want. Similarly Google has given users
simple user interface with only search box as compared with its competitors, whose home
pages are filled with unnecessary information.

Question 3: What do Google and Xerox have in common? Support your answer with
information from the text.

Answer: Google and Xerox are same in the aspect that both of these companies became so
much famous for their products (i.e. search engine and photocopier machines respectively),
that people started using their company name as a verb, to show the action performed by
their product. For example, people started saying “Google” this topic instead of search this
topic, for searching any topic online. Similarly people started using Xerox company name to
represent the action of photocopying e.g. Can u please “Xerox” (i.e. photocopy) these files
for me?