Microsoft’s ‘Get It Done’ campaign stresses how easy technology has made it to work from anywhere, but many question if doing so is a good idea. Featured in it are statistics that show the percentages of people who keep plugging away regardless of where they are or what they’re doing. Those numbers were gathered by Microsoft with the help of Harris Interactive, Inc. Researchers found that among those polled 55% said they need the ability to get work done regardless of where they are. For 19 percent of them that includes in the bathroom. Nearly half said they’ve remotely participated in meetings while on vacation. Over a quarter reported that they’d performed work-related tasks while out for happy hour. Though the ad campaign certainly shows the flexibility technology provides, it’s also raised questions about whether taking advantage of it is a good idea. Among the concerns expressed is that individuals are increasingly packing more work into their day at the expense of their work performance and their health.

Can you find the words or expressions in the text that have the same or similar meaning?

1. one fourth of something

2. from a distance

3. worry

4. to take part

5. to make use of

6. to collect

7. to keep working hard

8. to interview in a survey

9. the ability to change easily

10. not depending on something

Key:

1. quarter

2. remotely

3. concern

4. to participate

5. to take advantage of

6. to gather

7. to plug away

8. to poll

9. flexibility

10. regardless of something

The inventor who revolutionized the personal computer. The son of a lawyer and dropped out student of Harvard University who has become the owner of  the world’s largest personal computer software company, Microsoft, though he had no formal business training.  Once he commented that he wished he were not the richest man in the world because he disliked the attention it brought.

Most people know three things about Bill Gates: He’s the richest man in America, he co-founded one of the most successful tech companies of all time in Microsoft, and he’s an extremely generous philanthropist through the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation

But there are a lot of things about Gates you probably didn’t know.

As a young teenager at Lakeside Prep School, Gates wrote his first computer program on a General Electric computer — it was a version of tic-tac-toe, where you could play against the computer.

Once his school realized Gates’ proclivities for coding, they let him write the school’s computer program for scheduling students in classes. He even slyly altered the code so he was placed in classes with a “disproportionate number of interesting girls.”

Like many other successful tech entrepreneurs, Gates was a college dropout. He left Harvard University in 1975 to fully devote himself to Microsoft.

Gates was once arrested in New Mexico, in 1977. He was driving without a license and ran a red light.

Despite his immense wealth, Gates says his kids (daughters Jennifer and Phoebe and son Rory) will only inherit $10 million each — just a fraction of his $81.1 billion net worth. “Leaving kids massive amounts of money is not a favor to them,” he says.

Gates doesn’t know any foreign languages. That, he says, is his biggest regret in life thus far.

When he was 7 years old he decided to read the entire encyclopaedia, but he only got to the Ps.

It should come as no surprise that the young Gates demonstrated a staggering intellect as a kid. He left perhaps his biggest impression as an 11-year-old in his church confirmation class. Every year, Reverend Dale Turner challenged his pupils to memorize chapters 5-7 of the Book of Matthew – which is the Sermon on the Mount – and treated the successful ones to dinner in a restaurant. When Gates took his turn, Reverend Turner was stunned as the boy recited the approximately 2,000-word text with zero errors. Among 31 of his classmates Gates was the only one to deliver a flawless performance.

Gates scored a 1590 out of 1600 on his SATs.

Gates says if Microsoft hadn’t worked out, he probably would’ve been a researcher for artificial intelligence.

Gates has stated that he plans to give away 95 percent of his fortune to charity, but as you might expect from someone named “world’s richest man” by Forbes for 16 of the past 21 years, he’s also made his share of lavish purchases. Topping that list are the $36 million he paid for the Winslow Homer painting “Lost on the Grand Banks,” and $30 million for a Leonardo da Vinci journal known as the Codex Leicester, a collection of writings by Leonardo da Vinci. He acquired the codex at a 1994 auction for $30.8 million.

He also shelled out $21 million for a private jet, an understandable expenditure for a man with so much global business. And then there’s his estate in Medina, Washington: Valued at more than $120 million and nicknamed “Xanadu 2.0,” the 66,000-square-foot behemoth has a private beach, an Art Deco home theater, a 60-foot pool with an underwater sound system and a trampoline room.

And a very fresh piece of news: Amancio Ortega, who transformed clothing group Inditex from a tiny family dressmaker into Spain’s biggest company, briefly overtook Bill Gates on Friday October 25^th 2015 to become the world’s richest man.

Although a 10 percent surge in the share price of Microsoft later on Friday put the software firm’s founder Gates back on top, the brief appearance of Ortega at the summit of the Forbes “real time” global rich list was hailed in Spain as a milestone.

At one point on Friday, Forbes put Ortega’s fortune at $79.9 billion more than Gates’. Later in the day, thanks to fluctuations in the euro as well as the surge in Microsoft, Gates had $79.3 billion and Ortega a mere $78.5 billion.

source: businessinsider.com