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  3. Both at home and abroad, more people are turning to crowd funding sites

Both at home and abroad, more people are turning to crowd funding sites

游客2024-11-05  8
问题         Both at home and abroad, more people are turning to crowd funding sites to ask friends, and friends of friends, for help with medical bills, accident costs and much more. An estimated $2.8 billion was raised by all types of crowdfunding websites last year globally. The following article provides more details on this phenomenon.
        Write an article of NO LESS THAN 300 words, in which you should:
        1. summarize briefly the article;
        2. give your comment.
        Crowdfunding isn’t just for businessman anymore; it’s moving into all kinds of other spheres, from startups to research to personal causes. And increasingly, people felled by illness or injury are using these sites to raise money for their health care.
        One site that’s capitalized on personal-cause crowd funding is GoFundMe. CEO Brad Damphousse says last year alone, the site’s users have raised more than $6 million for medical causes, and Medical, Illness & Healing is the site’s most popular category, attracting 17 percent of the site’s total donations.
        Some GoFundMe campaigns in the medical category range from modest requests for $1,000 to cover gas cards for parents to visit their baby son in the NICU, to ambitious goals to raise $200,000 for a medical trust fund.
        Damphousse says most users raise funds through people they know and their friends because the site makes it easy for them to broadcast their cause on Facebook and Twitter. And the bigger the social network, the easier it is to reach the goal. But not everyone succeeds. People with small social networks tend to have more trouble meeting their fundraising goals, he says. According to statistics, it appeared that the people who are closest to their goals have at least 200 Facebook friends.
        Media coverage can also make a big difference. The story of Farrah Soudani, one of the victims of the Aurora theater shootings, attracted enough publicity that thousands of strangers were inspired to donate. So far 6,800 strangers have sent Soudani money through GoFundMe, much of it in $5 to $20 increments, according to Victoria Albright, a family friend who created the GoFundMe page the night of the shooting.
        "It’s a very easy vehicle to raise money," Albright says.
        Soudani’s page has gotten her $171,540 in donations, still shy of the $200,000 goal. The money so far has gone to pay Soudani’s cellphone bill and a shower chair while she recuperates in the hospital; the rest will go toward any medical expenses Soudani incurs that aren’t covered by public assistance. One reason Damphousse thinks strangers help each other on his site is that people like to see the direct impact of their dollars. "If you’re donating to a big nonprofit, you don’t know exactly how your money will be utilized, but on our site you might be thanked personally by the recipient," says Damphousse.
        But are these sites ripe for fraud? "We do have cheaters signing up," Damphousse admits. He has an internal team that vets every page, looking for hucksters, and shuts them down. One user of GoFundMe managed to fool the company—along with his friends and family—and raised $2,000 around a false claim that he had cancer.
        The site also encourages transparency by revealing the email account associated with the payment account. Potential donors can also see who else has donated lately.
        Medical institutions are getting into the crowd funding spirit, too. As Business Week has reported, the Rare Genomics Institute is helping children with mysterious illnesses solicit money online to pay for the sequencing of their genes.
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答案                                                                 Crowd Funding: a Helping Hand or a Trouble Maker?
        Crowd funding, once a way of attracting funds for business starters, has now become a way for ordinary people to raise money from the public out of personal needs: medical bills, accident costs and much more, among which medical costs represent a majority of the fund raised through crowd funding websites. Crowd funding websites such as GoFundMe believe that online crowd funding offers convenience for people and attracts funds through its directness as compared with donations to large charity organizations. Besides, medical institutions are soliciting money to fund their research and treatment of certain illnesses. But on the other hand crowd funding is vulnerable to fraud.
        Despite the popularity of online crowd funding, I have several major concerns on this new way of raising money from the public for personal causes. Firstly, it is difficult to authenticate every case and ensure transparency. Online registration and broadcast, though bringing speed of spreading the message, grant anonymity and decrease credibility. There are cases that people use fake ID information and create unreal cases to raise funds, calling for public awareness and the strengthening of the screening system. Secondly, the popularity of online crowd funding will aggravate inequality in receiving the funds. As mentioned by GoFundMe, the most successful fundraisers are those who are popular on social network. Therefore, those who are not Facebook lovers but indeed in need of the assistance will get less money through crowd funding. It will only make it worse for these people if the public is more willing to donate to online crowd funding websites instead of charity organizations.
        In conclusion, online crowd funding boast its great influence and transparency, but there is still a long way to go as there are several major issues that crowd funding systems should address before it is popularized. Proper guidance and equality are needed on this subject.
解析         材料围绕当前的“众筹治病现象”进行分析，文章可分为三部分。
        第一部分（第一段）指出众筹平台的使用主体的变化：越来越多的病人利用它筹集善款。
        第二部分（中间十段）以GoFundMe为例，说明众筹治病的资金来源、众筹治病的优点及潜在的弊端。首先，资金来源主要有两方，一是社交网络（social network）的熟人圈子，二是在媒体的影响力下（Media coverage）的陌生人。其次，众筹平台具有直接性的特点，方便病人直接进行筹资，而捐赠者往往倾向于看到善款的直接作用（direct impact of their dollars），并且众筹平台鼓励增强善款走向的透明度（encourages transparency）。最后，众筹平台也存在弊端，它引来一些欺诈团伙（fraud），为此专门有一支内部团队对此进行打击（shuts them down）。
        第三部分讲了众筹精神（the crowd funding spirit）扩展到对医疗机构（Medical institutions）的影响，有些机构也采取众筹方式筹集研究经费。
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