Life & English: Amazon.com and Amazon River

Amazon.com

July 2018, Amazon's chief Jeff Bezos is the first person to top $100 billion as number one on the Forbes list of the World's Billionaires.

Amazon.com is an American electronic commerce and cloud computing company based in Seattle that was founded by Jeff Bezos on July 5 - 1994, in the garage of Bezos' rented home. Now the tech giant is the largest Internet retailer in the world as measured by revenue and market capitalization. Amazon started as an online bookstore and later diversified to sell audio books, video games, software, electronics, furniture, food, clothes, toys, jewelry... This company is the world's largest provider of cloud infrastructure services… Amazon has separate retail websites for the United States, the United Kingdom and Ireland, France, Canada, Germany, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Australia, Brazil, Japan, China, India, and Mexico. In 2016, Dutch, Polish, and Turkish language versions of the German Amazon website were also launched. Amazon also offers international shipping of some of its products to certain other countries.

Bezos selected the name Amazon by looking through the dictionary; he settled on “Amazon” because it was a place that was “exotic and different”, just as he had envisioned for his Internet enterprise. The Amazon River, he noted, was the biggest river in the world, and he planned to make his store the biggest bookstore in the world. Additionally, a name that began with “A” was preferential due to the probability it would occur at the top of an alphabetized list.

Amazon River

Amazon River of South America is the world's largest river and the lifeblood of the world's largest ecosystem. Running about 4,000 miles (6,400 kilometers), it is home to a huge variety of animalsand plants that dwell in its lush, evergreen environment.

The area covered by the Amazon River and its tributaries more than triples between the dry season and wet season over the course of a year. In an average dry season, 110,000 square kilometers of land are water-covered, while in the wet season the flooded area of the Amazon basin rises to 350,000 square kilometers. At its widest point the Amazon River can be 6.8 miles (11 kilometers) wide during the dry season, but during the rainy season when the Amazon River floods the surrounding plains it can be up to 24.8 miles (40 kilometers) wide. The waters of the Amazon support a diverse range of wildlife. Along with the Orinoco, the river is one of the main habitats of the Boto, also known as the Amazon River Dolphin. The largest species of river dolphin, it can grow to lengths of up to 2.6 meters. The river also supports thousands of species of fish, as well as crabs and turtles.

Quy Minh