A、1990. B、1995. C、1997. D、2000. D

How many of you are familiar with the name Jeff Bezos? OK, how about Amazon.com? Have you heard of that? Well, Amazon.com is the world’s first and largest Internet bookstore, and Jeff Bezos is the man who started Amazon.com back in 1995. Five years later, Amazon.com was serving millions of customers in 120 different countries. Amazing, right? And this is the reason why, in 1999, Jeff Bezos was selected as Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, a very great honor.
   Now, Jeff Bezos is actually not the topic of my lecture today, but he is a perfect example of my topic, which is about entrepreneurs. It’s a French word meaning a person who starts a completely new business or industry, um, someone who does something no one else has done before, like Jeff Bezos, who started the very first Internet bookstore. Entrepreneurs like Jeff Bezos are very highly respected in American society and, I think, in many other countries too.
   OK, let’s begin by looking at the characteristics of entrepreneurs. There are two qualities that I think all entrepreneurs have in common. First, entrepreneurs have vision. I mean that they have the ability to see opportunities that other people simply do not see. Let’s look again at the example of Jeff Bezos. One day in 1994, he was surfing the Internet when suddenly he had a brilliant idea= why not use the Internet to sell products? Remember, at that time, no one was using the Internet in that way. After doing some research, Bezos decided that the product he wanted to sell was books. That’s how Amazon.com got its start.
   The other quality that I think all entrepreneurs possess is that they are not afraid to take risks. As an example, let me tell you about Fred Smith, who founded Federal Express, the company that delivers packages anywhere in the United States overnight. Smith first suggested the idea for his company in a college term paper. Do you know what grade he got on it? A "C"! But this didn’t stop him, and today his company is worth more than two billion dollars and employs more than 25,000 people.
   Now let’s take a look at their backgrounds, and here we’ll find lots of differences. First of all, some entrepreneurs are well educated, like Jeff Bezos, who graduated from Princeton University. But others, like Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft Corporation, never even finished college. Next, some entrepreneurs come from rich families, like Fred Smith, the founder of Federal Express. In contrast, other entrepreneurs come from poor families. A great example is Andrew Grove, the former chairman of the Intel computer company, who was born in Hungary and came to America as a refugee after World War Ⅱ.
15. When was Amazon.com serving millions of customers in 120 different countries?
16.Among these entrepreneurs, who graduated from Princeton University?
17.Which statement is NOT true about Fred Smith?
18.Which quality does Jeff Bezos have?