As our site grows every day we want to share some information with you on the way we are operating the project. We call this section «Business Blog» as it is similar to doing a log book where data is recorded in a chronological order. «Blogging» is gaining popularity with more and more people picking up the habit of publishing their experiences and thoughts on the Internet. Our Blog covers various topics — from TOEFL, TOEIC, MBA, GMAT, ESL/EFL test preperation to cultural traditions and current political events.
There will also be some Internet marketing terminology and if you have any questions regarding the information simply let us know.

The Business Blog is written by Torsten Daerr and edited by Alan Townend.

2003 — August 22
This week Alan has created three new tests each of which focuses on a single topic — computers, life on Mars and flying in a plane. As usual the tests are not your typical rather dull grammar grind but a good mix of interesting facts, useful information spiced with typical British humour that makes you smile or chuckle rather than laugh out loud. The good thing with this project is that I’m getting high quality tuition at the same time as I’m working. This doesn’t happen often in a regular job, does it?

Slava, our programmer has been putting in lots of his ideas and energy into this site and the first results of his work are becoming apparent. The «spiders» of his fellow country man, Sergey Brin, have finally indexed almost all of our pages — 137 as of now to be exact. Why is this important? Well, we think with 500 million people using the internet worldwide, free English language tests can’t get enough exposure.

I have made an attempt to write an article on the differences between British and American English and this topic turned out to be more complex that I had thought. There are so many issues to go into further so this can only be the start of an exchange of experiences and observations. I think English is one of the fastest changing languages and it both creates as well as absorbs new words and terms almost on a daily basis. That’s why even the highest qualified linguist can only represent a tiny little fraction of all the data available on this subject. I’ve just sent my article off to Alan (By the way, this phrase is rather British) and am very curious to get his professional opinion on the topic…

2003 — August 21
As promised we’ll look into HTML and domains today and we’ll do it both from a technical as well as a linguistic point of view.
HTML stands for Hyper Text Mark up Language and can be regarded as one of the backbones of the internet because it enables you to link documents together by so called «hyperlinks». These documents can be located at any server that is connected to the internet because any browser understands and translates HTML — so what English is to us human beings is HTML to our computers.
You see, people create new technologies and give them new names. A couple of years ago no one knew what «hypertext» was no matter what their mother tongue happened to be. We learn new words and phrases throughout our lives. The only difference is that when you want to learn English as a second language you have to learn a bit faster..
The second term we wanted to shed some more light on is URL. So, we know URL stands for «Uniform Resource Locator» and it is the unique internet address of each document that is stored on an internet server. For example the page where you find our stories has the following unique address: http://www.english-test.net/stories/
Each website can contain thousands of pages that all have their unique URL. Now, if you want to learn more about HTML, PHP, Javascript, Nuke and other technical stuff — you’d better ask Mr Gromov…

As for a good domain name, well, that’s an interesting question as the success of an internet marketing campaign can depend on how you solve this issue. What exactly is a good domain name? In our opinion, a good domain name should be

• descriptive («travelnow.com» is descriptive whereas «darville-store.com» is not) short (many people make don’t like typing long addresses into their browser)
• easy to memorize (although «savvy» is fairly short «clever» might be more likely to be memorized because this word is more popular)

OK; we are just «scratching» the surface here — there is so much more to domain name marketing and any professional online marketer might bear with us but we don’t want to give you all the «meat» at once, let’s take it one bit at a time.
After all, we want to you to pay us a visit often…

2003 — August 20
Today we opened our partner section where we introduce useful sites which you can check here: http://www.english-test.net/partners/. Everyday new websites emerge and it certainly takes two life times to study and explore them all. That’s why we pick the ones we find most appropriate and valuable for you. After all that’s what the Internet is all about — a network of various resources that are linked somehow to each other. Very much like in the real world which makes perfect sense because the internet reflects what people think and create. Please, send us your suggestions should you come across a website you find worth being added to our partner section.

It occurred to me that when it comes to a website address things can get pretty confusing as there are quite a number of different terms involved and for each of these terms there can be various definitions. It goes without saying that all these words are of modern English origin and interestingly enough they are used in many languages and no-one would ever try to translate them.

So, let’s start with «homepage» versus «website». To me, the word «homepage» has a private or personal flavour whereas «website» suggests that it’s a larger project or business. I personally prefer «website» and never use the word «homepage» because «page» means it’s one single HTML document. (For those of you who don’t know what exactly HTML, is we’ll look into that soon.)

Now, a website has it’s own «domain» — it’s own unique web address which usually consists of three parts. A webserver reads this web address from right to left starting with the so called «top level domain» that is followed by the «dot». So for example our domain is www.english-test.net — net being the top level domain, english-test the name itself and the three «w’s» can be left out if you have a modern webrowser.

OK; maybe this will do for starters, tomorrow we’ll look into «URL’s» and «good» domain names.

2003 — August 19
Today we added short and to the point vocabulary explanations to the stories that focus on phrasal verbs. The tricky thing about phrasal verbs is that you often have no way of knowing what a particular combination actually means. Would you have thought that «he was trying to do for me» translates as «he was trying to kill me»? Yet, in a different context the same combination «do for» can mean something different as in this example: «Clara did for the Millers for five years«.
Can you guess the meaning of this sentence? Yes, it means that Clara cleaned the house for the Millers for five years. Phrasal verbs make the English language very flexible because you can cover a wide range of contexts with a limited number of words by combining them in many different ways.

We’ve done a loading time check of our site and noticed that the Babylon banner is rather «heavy» and Slava has replaced it with another one smilar in appearance but which has a smaller file size. If you feel our site takes too long to load please let us know about it via email so Slava can make any necessary adjustment.

Tomorrow I’ll meet with Kaley, a man from Kazakhstan whose wife is a German born Russian. He wants to improve his German communication skills and we’ll work out a plan that will help him achieve his goals as soon as possible. The interesting thing is that people who relocate to another country see their new environment with different eyes and when they don’t speak the language very well they have to rely on other communication channels such as intonation and body language. And it’s always the people with the highest level of interest in their new surroundings who adapt the quickest. Judging by our first telephone conversation it is to that group that Kaley belongs.