Google Streetview to cover every UK road

Google Streetview to cover every UK road

Pictures of nearly every street in the country are to be made available via Google. From Thursday, Streetview will feature 360-degree images of more than 99 per cent of the United Kingdom’s roads, both rural and urban, covering a total of approximately 238,000 miles.
The company launched Streetview in 25 UK cities in March last year and since then has been working on surveying the rest of the country using specially designed cars fitted with cameras. Hard to access areas have been captured using tricycles. Spain, France, Italy and the USA are already covered.
Google uses automatic technology to blur faces and car number plates, and allows users to request that their property be removed from the service. Former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney has asked for his house to be taken off the site, for instance.
A survey commissioned by Google indicated that Streetview’s launch has coincided with a 30 per cent increase in people using the website’s mapping technology, available at maps.google.co.uk. Six out of ten of those users had consulted Streetview to find out what a place they were going looked like, while one-third had used it to look at locations abroad and 21 per cent had used it to help while house hunting.
Sandie Dawe, the chief executive of the official website to promote UK tourism, VisitBritain.com, welcomed the launch of the nationwide service. She said that Streetview was one of the “first places people turn to when planning a visit to one of Britain's many world-class attractions.”
Future applications for Streetview technology could include shopping; cameras have already been spotted photographing American supermarkets.

Question 1 Indicate whether these sentences are true or false. Justify your answers with evidence from the text:
a) Different forms of transport were used to photograph Britain for Streetview.
b) Britain is the first country that Streetview has included on its website.
c) Paul McCartney does not want people to be able to see where he lives on Streetview.
d) Streetview is bad for tourism.

Question 2 Answer these questions in your own words:
a) How does google streetview protect individual privacy?
b) What do people use streetview for?

Question 3 Find a word or phrase in the text that means the same as:
a) include par.1
b) equipped par.2
c) discover/learn par. 4

Question 4 Rewrite the following sentences without changing the meaning
a) Streetview allows users to request that their property be removed from the service.
If you do not want your house to be on Streetview, .......
b) There has been a 30 per cent increase in people using the website’s mapping technology
The number of people using the website’s technology………………………………….
c) Six out of ten users had consulted Streetview to find out what a place they were going looked like.
Streetview ......................................

Question 5 Write a short essay (120-150 words) on the following topic:
Nowadays, there are so many ways of finding out about places we would like to travel to. Which do you use?

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