Diary Of A Wimpy Kid: Page 6 & Washington Post Business

Amazon hits record $3 billion in profit off strong holiday season

Amazon closed 2018 with a record $3 billion in profit in the fourth quarter, running off the fuel of the holiday season to beat Wall Street expectations. But its guidance for the start of 2019 fell short.

On Thursday, the retail giant announced its sales were up 20 percent in the last quarter to $72.4 billion. Amazon Web Services, the company’s cloud computing division, reported a 45 percent jump in the fourth quarter to hit $7.43 billion in sales. AWS revenue alone made up 10 percent of Amazon’s total quarterly sales — reinforcing just how dominant cloud computing has become for a company broadly thought of as an online retailer.

The results also offered a full look at Amazon’s performance in 2018. For the year, net sales were up 31 percent to $232.9 billion, compared to $177.9 billion in 2017.

The company said that for the first quarter of 2019, net sales are expected to fall between $56 billion and $60 billion — though some analysts had set their sights on nearly $61 billion. Amazon projected first-quarter growth to hit between 10 and 18 percent compared to the same period last year.

Amazon stock was up nearly 3 percent Thursday evening and closed for the day at $1,718.73 per share.

Amazon founder and chief executive Jeffrey P. Bezos pointed to sales of Echo Dot devices in 2018 and said “Alexa was very busy during her holiday season.” He said that the number of research scientists working on Alexa has more than doubled in the past year.

“In 2018, we improved Alexa’s ability to understand requests and answer questions by more than 20 percent through advances in machine learning,” Bezos said in a statement. “We added billions of facts making Alexa more knowledgeable than ever. Developers doubled the number of Alexa skills to over 80,000. And customers spoke to Alexa tens of billions more times in 2018 compared to 2017.”

Colombia’s Radical Plan to Welcome Millions of Venezuelan Migrants

“I’ve never seen a government trying this hard to register people and leave the borders open.”

VILLA DEL ROSARIO, Colombia—Thousands of people stand idly about, families sitting near heaps of luggage. Groups cram into every bit of available shade, eager to ignore the shouts of salesmen hawking potatoes or medication. Nearby, bus companies promote “no passport” travel inland.

This is what a migration crisis looks like. For more than two years, a steady stream of people—many toting little more than ragged backpacks and bags—have crossed into this Colombian town and others like it, escaping their crumbling homeland, Venezuela, which has been weathering an economic collapse and, more recently, a political crisis.

Thus far, Colombia has opened its doors as millions of people have flocked to its border. Politicians here know there is no way to keep these migrants out, so instead of railing against its neighbor or raising the drawbridge, they have focused on integrating those who arrive, efforts that have been commended by aid agencies. But with almost 1.5 million Venezuelans here, equivalent to about 3 percent of Colombia’s population, and more arriving every day, the country may soon be entirely overwhelmed.

Vocabulary

integrate 整合

e.g. Columbia is trying to integrate the Venezuelan migrants into their society.

crisis / 危机

e.g. There is a big crisis happening in Venezuela right now.

migrants 移民 / a person who travels from place to place

migration / the act of traveling from place to place

immigrant / a person who leaves one country to live in another country

e.g. In China, we do not have many African immigrants — people who want to live in China coming from Africa.

immigration / is the movement of people from one country into another country

e.g. President Trump is very unhappy with illegal immigration into the United States from Mexico.

radical 激进 / extreme or crazy

e.g. Nicholas and Joyce had a radical plan — they would travel the world!

e.g Joyce had a radial idea! She would become an English teacher!

“hits record…” / this was the highest ever

e.g Amazon hit a record $3B in profits off a strong holiday season.

“running off the fuel..” / what is giving it energy / what is the source or what is the reason for this success

e.g. How does a car move? It runs off fuel.

e.g. Joyce is so successful that’s because she’s running off the fuel of strong motivation.

beat / to win / to go over and above

e.g. Amazon beat Wall Street estimates for company profits.

dominant / cannot be beaten or very very strong / no one can win against them

e.g. Amazon’s cloud computing services are dominant in the technology world.

e.g. When it comes to table tennis, China is dominant. But when it comes to basketball, African Americans are dominant. It means “who is the best?”.

“the cloud” / cloud computing  / 云计算

e.g. A long time ago, people had to save their document on their local computer, but now they don’t have to save things not their computer, they can save them in “the cloud”. So the cloud is like computer memory held at a company not held on your person computer for example, iCloud and Amazon Web services.

machine learning / 机器学习 / the computer become smarter by themselves

e.g. Machine learning is a technology that is growing very quickly today.

voice recognition / this is the technology where a computer or iPhone can recognize the human voice and speech and then do what the human says

e.g. Nicholas thought it was difficult for iPhones to have voice recognition technology for the Chinese language — he was wrong!

Alexa / Amazon’s personal assistant

Pronunciation

Amazon / ANNIE-ANNIE-APPLE-A-MIH-ZON

executive / EGG-ZECK-YOU-TIVE

Grammar

they likes to playing / they like to play

I think the first thing firstly they are very happy because we have …long time not to see each other we haven’t seen each other in a long time but 2-3 days later they will think we are boring because you know we are not together all the time, so sometimes we have different opinions on something / things so we will argue with each other, so they will be unhappy, and I will be unhappy / so we tend to annoy (惹恼) each other.

I will see them after the New Year. In Chinese year traditional In China, it’s tradition that we will see each other after the new year and before the new year we will stay at home. No I just watching TV and sleeping. Maybe I’ll do some reading.

They give gave us money when we are were children, but after I am 20 turned 20 they didn’t give us any money. When you are child you will get lots of money from your parents, from your grandfather, grandmother and your uncle — they all will give you money.

They often told tell me to do this but they have no decision / power.