Googlefight is a simple service available on the Internet which offers you the chance to compare two different items and see how many hits they get on the Google search engine. The seemingly simple device has proved invaluable to users, especially to help win arguments.
For example, imagine that you and your friends are arguing about who are the most popular music or movie stars, you can decide the argument by writing the names in the Googlefight boxes. Let’s say that you are arguing about Jackie Chan and Jet Li. You will quickly discover that Jet Li is mentioned 16 million times on Google pages, whereas Jackie Chan is mentioned a mere 12 million times! In this unscientific way, you can claim victory for one Star over another.
But teachers have come up with ways of using Googlefight which are much more useful from an academic point of view, particularly when it comes to studying languages. You can, for example, find out the frequency of two words with the same meaning, and deduce (推断) from the answers which one is more common. For example, let’s take the words “buy” and “purchase”, which mean the same thing (although “buy” is only a verb and “purchase” is both a verb and a noun). It is immediately clear from Googlefight that “buy” is much more commonly used, with a massive three and a half billion hits, compared to only one billion occurrences for the more formal word.
But the real value of Googlefight to the language learner is in determining which is the more common of two phrases. For example, “raining cats and dogs” is an old-fashioned English expression about the weather. Do English speakers still use it? Or are they more likely to say “pouring down”? Googlefight suggests the latter. “Pouring down” has 898,000 Google hits, whereas “raining cats and dogs” only has 326,000.
With phrases, it’s important to remember that you need to use quote marks to make the search more accurate. For example, if you type in the similar phrases “look after” and “take care of “ without quote marks, the second phrase seems to be more common, but with quote marks, the result is reversed.
小题1:What is Googlefight?
A．A fight between two people on Google.
B．A way to make sure you win an argument.
C．A website showing how many hits two different things have.
D．A list of all the websites on Google.小题2:Language teachers find it useful because _______.
A．there are a lot of words on Googlefight
B．it can tell them which of the two words with the same meaning appears more often
C．some words mean the same thing
D．common words have a billion hits小题3:What must you remember to do if you are checking phrases by Googlefight?
A．Make sure they mean be same thing.
B．Make sure they are different.
C．Remember to put quote marks round the phrase.
D．Don’t put quote marks round the phrase.小题4:Which statement is NOT true according to the passage?
A．Googlefight is effective to determine the more common of two phrases.
B．Googlefight is a scientific way to decide an argument.
C．Quote marks can make the search more accurate.
D．Googlefight is invaluable to help win arguments.
