By Valdirene Ruston, BBC Learning English

媒體英語會帶大家一起學習BBC撰稿人在報道世界大事時常用到的單詞和短語。

Background: 英國科學家蒂姆·伯納斯（Tim Berners-Lee）20年前創造了第一個網頁。發展到今天，萬維網已經擁有一萬億左右的網頁。萬維網徹底改變了我們人與人之間的交流方式，很多人甚至無法想象沒有網絡的生活。你覺得呢？你通常使用網絡都做些什么呢？請發郵件告訴我們 [email protected].

On Christmas Day 1990, in a laboratory in Switzerland, British physicist Tim Berners-Lee finished developing the tools to create the World Wide Web. He was working at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research, Cern, in Geneva.

His boss gave him the green light to work on the project during his spare time and together with the help of his Belgian colleague Robert Cailliau, Tim Berners-Lee produced the world's first webpage.

The experiment heralded a new era because it demonstrated how computers could talk to each other through a new language they created called Hyper-Text Markup Language, or HTML.

Currently there might be anything up to a trillion webpages with all sorts of content. People buy and sell products and services, make friends through these pages, learn and teach. We found many enthusiasts of the web in the streets of London.

Man 1: “It means having information in your home with easy access which in the past would have only been available in thousands of libraries. So it’s information at your fingertips.”

Woman: “Access to a lot of people really. We’ve got a lot of family overseas so we use Skype quite a bit.”

Man 2: “Information, news, social groups.”

Man 3: “I’m just using it usually for emails and social networking with my friends and well, reading newspapers and information. Basically everything!”

Fortunes were made in the World Wide Web. Many say that Tim Berners-Lee could have been a billionaire through his invention but he said that all he wants is to keep the egalitarian spirit of the web intact and the medium free to use. Many users share the same ideals.

Man 1: “I think that today it is essential to have an internet connection and that’s going to be a real problem in terms of you know, digital divide when some people in the world can’t access the internet or when the speed (connection speed) is not enough.”

And there are other concerns.

Woman: “I’m not very keen on that because of all the privacy issues and everything, I’m very aware of it. So I try to keep private things private as much as I can.”

And there are the diehards, who shy away from technology.

Man 2: “I leave it all to my wife, I hate computers.”