English Unlimited HTL 3, Schulbuch mit Audio-CD und CD-ROM

82 Lost and found 06 LANGUAGE SKILLS EXPLORE LOOK AGAIN EXTRAS Which group of expressions is used to: 35 Work alone. 37 a Imagine you are the personal assistant to Paul, the manager of the company in which Sara, Ralph, Tim and all the others work. Write a short email or a memo to inform your boss which pieces of furniture his employees have chosen. 36 Have you ever bought or sold anything on eBay? In groups, discuss your experiences. Read the article about strange things sold on the internet. Choose the correct answer (A, B, C or D) for questions 1–8. Put a cross ( ) in the correct box. The first one (0) has been done for you. 38 a b For sale on eBay e online auction website eBay was founded in 1995 by computer programmer Pierre Omidyar. e rst item sold on eBay was a broken laser pointer for $14.83. Omidyar had put that item up for bid only as an experiment, so he contacted the winning bidder to make sure the latter understood that the laser pointer was broken. e buyer replied that hewas a collector of broken laser pointers. By early 2008, the company had expanded worldwide with hundreds of millions of registered users. And selling strange things on eBay continues. Ian Usher, 44, put his entire life in Australia up for sale on eBay, with a starting price of one Australian dollar. On oer was his home, his Mazda car and his Kawasaki motorbike. Originally from County Durham, England, Mr Usher loved his life in Perth, Australia. But when he divorced from his wife, Laura, he decided to oer it to the highest bidder. On his website, Mr Usher said, “My life here is absolutely fantastic. But I just want to make a clean break and start again, so I am selling everything from the contents of my wardrobe to my car.” When bidding closed, he received $384,000. Usher was not the rst person to auction his life on eBay. In 2007, another Australian, Nicael Holt, oered his existence to the highest bidder, in a package that included his name, phone number, CDs and childhood photographs, a circle of friends and “a repertoire of 6 jokes”. Holt, a 24-year-old philosophy undergraduate, also oered to teach the buyer his skills, including sur ng, skateboarding and handstands. An unknown buyer eventually bought his life for $7,500. In December 2002, Joe and Elizabeth Lapple used eBay to auction Bridgeville, a largely uninhabited 82-acre town 260 miles north of San Francisco. It drew a large number of bids, including a late oer of $1,777,877 from a buyer who did not complete the sale. e land, including a post oce and a cemetery, had been owned by the Lapples since 1985. It was the rst town oered in an online auction and has been auctioned three times since. Kyle MacDonald had a red paper clip and a dream: Could he use the community power of the internet to barter that paper clip for something better, and trade that thing for something else – and so on and so on until he had a house? Starting with the paperclip, he traded up through a doorknob, a camping stove, a snowmobile, a recording contract, and an a±ernoon with rock star Alice Cooper. It took him exactly 14 internet trades to move from the paper clip to a house on Main Street in the tiny town of Kipling in southeast Saskatchewan, Canada. a compare? b describe something vaguely? c categorise? 1 It’s a sort of chair. It’s a kind of new trend. 2 It looks like an orange peel. It’s sort of like a cupboard on wheels. I suppose it’s a bit cabinet -like . 3 I’d like to buy the funny thing we saw yesterday. … kind of roundish … … sort of greyish , blackish colours. Explore reading: Strange things sold on eBay 1 Think of an interesting object. It could be: 2 Think about how to describe it with the highlighted expressions in 35. In groups, listen to the descriptions. Try to guess what the object is or try to draw it. b a holiday souvenir a gift you received a possession an ornament Nur zu Prüfzwecken – Eigentum des Verlags öbv