Read the text and choose the correct answer (A, B or C) for each statement. There is ONLY ONE correct answer for each question. There is an example below the text. 

THEFACEBOOK

At the end of June 2017, Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook had hit a new level: two billion monthly active users. Bear in mind that when thefacebook – its original name – was launched in 2004, the target users were exclusively Harvard students. The speed of uptake far exceeds that of the internet itself, let alone ancient technologies such as television or cinema or radio.

Also amazing: as Facebook has grown, its users’ dependence on it has also grown. The increase in numbers is not, as one might expect, accompanied by a lower level of engagement. On the contrary. In October 2012, when Facebook hit one billion users, 55 per cent of

them were using it every day and its user base is growing at 18 per cent a year – which you’d have thought impossible for a business already so enormous. Facebook’s biggest rival for logged-in users is YouTube, owned by its deadly rival Alphabet (the company formerly known as Google), in second place with 1.5 billion monthly users. Three of the next four biggest apps, or services, are WhatsApp, Messenger and Instagram, with 1.2 billion, 1.2 billion, and 700 million users respectively (the Chinese app WeChat is the other one, with 889 million). Those three entities have something in common: they are all owned by Facebook.

Jesse Eisenberg’s brilliant portrait of Zuckerberg in The Social Network is misleading, as Antonio García Martínez, a former Facebook manager, argues in Chaos Monkeys, his entertaining book about his time at the company. In the movie, Zuckerberg is a highly credible character, a computer genius located somewhere on the autistic spectrum with minimal to non-existent social skills. But that’s not what the man is really like. Actually, Zuckerberg was studying for a degree with a double concentration in computer science and – this is the part people tend to forget – psychology. People on the spectrum have a limited sense of how other people’s minds work; autists, it has been said, lack a ‘theory of mind’. Zuckerberg, not so much. He is very well aware of how people’s minds work and in particular of the social dynamics of popularity and status. The initial launch of Facebook was limited to people with a Harvard email address; the intention was to make access to the site seem select. (And also to control site traffic so that the servers never went down. Psychology and computer science, hand in hand.) Then it was extended to other well-known campuses in the US. When it was launched in the UK, it was limited to Oxbridge and the LSE. The idea was that people wanted to look at what other people like them were doing, to see their social networks, to compare and show off, to give full rein to every moment of longing and envy, to keep their noses pressed against the sweet- shop window of others’ lives.

This focus attracted the attention of Facebook’s first external investor, the now notorious Silicon Valley billionaire Peter Thiel, who became interested in the ideas of the US-based French philosopher René Girard, who stated that, once the fundamental necessities of life have been acquired, such as food and shelter, we look around us at what other people are doing, and wanting, and we copy them.

Girard was a Christian, and his view of human nature is that it is fallen. We don’t know what we want or who we are; we don’t really have values and beliefs of our own; what we have instead is an instinct to copy and compare. ‘Man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and who turns to others in order to make up his mind. We desire what others desire because we imitate their desires.’

(Adapted from: lrb.co.uk)

EXAMPLE

The Facebook was set up in ...

A. 2000.

B. 2004. CORRECT

C. 2017.