Sharpen Your Reading Skills: The Impact of E-commerce
Ready to practice your reading skills for a top exam score? Today’s topic is about the massive changes brought by e-commerce. When reading about a topic with clear comparisons, like e-commerce versus traditional stores, a great strategy is to look for comparison and contrast keywords (e.g., “however,” “in contrast,” “similarly”). These words signal important relationships between ideas.
Also, pay attention to cause and effect. The passage will discuss how the rise of e-commerce caused certain changes in business and society. Identifying these links will help you understand the core arguments of the text. Remember to work efficiently! Give yourself no more than 20 minutes to complete the reading and the questions. Good luck!
Reading Passage
Keywords & Phrases
- Catalyzed: (verb) To catalyze an event or process means to cause it to begin or to happen more quickly. We said the internet “catalyzed numerous societal transformations,” meaning it was the agent of change.
- Paradigm: (noun) A paradigm is a model or typical example of something. We used it to say e-commerce created a “new paradigm for global trade,” meaning a completely new model of how trade works.
- Brick-and-mortar: (adjective) This term describes a traditional business that serves customers in a physical building as opposed to online. We used it to refer to “brick-and-mortar stores.”
- Disintermediation: (noun) This is the removal of intermediaries (middlemen) in a supply chain. We used it to explain how e-commerce allows producers to sell “directly with consumers,” cutting out wholesalers and retailers.
- Proliferation: (noun) This means a rapid increase in the numbers of something. We used it to describe the “proliferation of massive fulfillment centers,” meaning that a huge number of them have been built quickly.
- Carbon footprint: (phrase) This is the total amount of greenhouse gases (including carbon dioxide) that are generated by our actions. We mentioned the “carbon footprint of transporting billions of individual packages” as a major environmental concern.
- Hyper-consumption: (noun) This is the consumption of goods beyond one’s actual needs. We used it to describe a potential negative effect of easy “one-click” shopping.
- Mitigating: (verb) To mitigate something means to make it less severe, serious, or painful. We used it in the conclusion, saying the challenge is “mitigating its negative externalities.”
- Externalities: (noun) In economics, an externality is a side effect or consequence of an industrial or commercial activity that affects other parties without this being reflected in the cost of the goods or services involved. “Environmental degradation” is a classic example of a negative externality.
- Inexorable: (adjective) This describes a process or force that is impossible to stop or prevent. We described the growth of e-commerce as “inexorable” to emphasize its powerful, unstoppable momentum.
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