Read the following passage and mark the letter A, B, C, or D on your answer sheet to indicate the correct answer to each of the questions from 36 to 42.
In many countries, a growing number of people in their twenties are turning to social media in the hope of finding work. Services like the social networking site Twitter and the professional networking site Linkedln offer the chance for more direct contact with would-be employers than has previously been the case. But with greater access comes a greater chance to make mistakes.
Take the case of a young jobseeker in the US who contacted a senior marketing executive via Linkedln. The marketing executive in question had an impressive list of influential people in her contact list; people whom the young jobseeker felt could help him land a job. The marketing executive, however, had other ideas. Indignant at the suggestion that she would willingly share a list of contacts painstakingly built up over many years with a complete stranger who'd done nothing to deserve such an opportunity, she not only rejected his contact request, but sent a vicious and heavily sarcastic rejection note that has since gone viral. But if the incident makes young people think more carefully about how they use social media in a professional capacity, she may have actually ended up doing them a favour. She has drawn attention to an unfortunate truth. Social media is a potentially dangerous tool for job hunters who don't know how to use it. And a worrying number are getting it wrong.
There's a horrible irony here, because in many countries social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter have been the bread and butter of twenty-somethings' social lives for years. When my generation were teenagers, social media was our escape from the prying eyes of parents and teachers. It was a cyber extension of the playground pecking order - a place to impress, to embellish and experiment. However, when it comes to using social media for professional networking, our very knowledge and experience of sites like Facebook may actually be a hindrance. Using social media in a professional capacity is a completely different ball game, but for some twenty-somethings, the division is not clear cut. We first
earned our online presence by being bold and over-confident, which could explain why some of us still come across like this. Just because a lot of people 'liked' your posts on Facebook, it doesn't mean you'll be able to use Linkedln to show potential employers that you're someone worth employing. We need to realise that what we learned about social networking as teenagers no longer applies, and we must live up to employers' standards if we want to get on in the world of work.
(Adapted from Cambridge English Advanced by Cambridge University Press)
