ANGLAIS SCIENTIFIQUE ET TECHNIQUE
OBJECTIFS
> COMPREHENSION GENERALE ET DETAILLEE D’UN ARTICLE DE PRESSE A COLORATION TECHNIQUE
> LEXIQUE : GRAMMATICALISATION, SIGLAISON, AMALGAMES LEXICAUX (MOTS-VALISE), BLOGS & PODCASTS
> SYNTAXE : LA FORME INTERROGATIVE, LES ARTICLES, COMPARATIF & SUPERLATIF
1. Overall comprehension: read the passage and tick the right answer(s)
Summer Camp for Coders
Sep. 15th 2005
[From The Economist - print edition]
Software: Google's new scheme keeps young geeks busy over the summer and boosts open-
source development
“I'm A total geek all around,” says Angela Byron, a 27-year-old computer programmer who has
just graduated from Nova Scotia Community College. And yet, like many other students, she “never
had the confidence” to approach any of the various open-source software communities on the
internet—distributed teams of volunteers who collaborate to build software that is then made freely
available. But thanks to Google, the world's most popular search engine and one of the biggest 5 proponents of open-source software, Ms Byron spent the summer contributing code to Drupal, an
open-source project that automates the management of websites. “It's awesome,” she says.
[http://drupal.org/]
Ms Byron is one of 419 students (out of 8,744 who applied) who were accepted for Google's
“summer of code”. While it sounds like a hyper-nerdy summer camp, the students neither went to 10 Google's campus in Mountain View, California, nor to wherever their mentors at the 41 participating
open-source projects happened to be located. Instead, Google acted as a matchmaker and sponsor.
Each of the participating open-source projects received $500 for every student it took on; and each
student received $4,500 ($500 right away, and $4,000 on completion of their work). Oh, and a T-shirt.
All of this is the idea of Chris DiBona, Google's open-source boss, who was brainstorming with 15 Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Google's founders, last year. They realised that a lot of programming
talent goes to waste every summer because students take summer jobs flipping burgers to make
money, and let their coding skills degrade. “We want to make it better for students in the summer,”
says Mr DiBona, adding that it also helps the open-source community and thus, indirectly, Google,
which uses lots of open-source software behind the scenes. Plus, says Mr DiBona, “it does become an 20 opportunity for recruiting.”
Elliot Cohen, a student at Berkeley, spent his summer writing a “Bayesian network toolbox” for
Python, an open-source programming language. “I'm a pretty big fan of Google,” he says. He has an
interview scheduled with Microsoft, but “Google is the only big company that I would work at,” he
says. And if that doesn't work out, he now knows people in the open-source community, “and it's a lot 25 less intimidating.”