英国新闻听力 借入与借出网站（在线收听）

THE HOST: 'Neither a borrower or a lender be' says a father to his son in William Shakespeare's famous play, Hamlet. But actually borrowing and lending is all part of family life and of the interaction between friends. How many of us have never borrowed or lent a book or a record or some money to a mate? However, and I am certainly speaking from experience here, most of us have probably forgotten to return stuff on occasions and this of course can lead to all kinds of tension. Well, the latest community website has found a way to make lending and borrowing much easier, or so they claim. Bill Monk offers you and your friends a chance to keep the record of all things you borrow online. So if you need that piece of music but forgot who has it, it's online for you and your group of friends to check out and sort out. But is this taking the trust out of friendship? Culture Shock's Jason Fips spoke to Bill Monk's co-founder Gaurav Oberoi and began by asking where they got the idea for the website from?

GAURAV: In 2004 myself and 3 of my friends took a nine-day vacation to Europe and before we got off the plane we decided that we would keep track of all the bills that we split, so for example, buying movie tickets or train tickets, meals, all sorts of stuff. And we did this. So every time we spent a big bill, we would write it down in a book and when we got back, I put all this data into a spread sheet and emailed it out to the guys and we emailed it back and forth with corrections and additions until we got a final number and then we wrote each other cheques. It was actually very useful because there were hundreds of dollars that ended up having to go back and forth. The great thing was that while on the trip no one worried about pulling out their credit card and paying for something and we didn't have to take out a lot of cash from the ATMs so that we could split bills as we went along. At the time I thought this would be a great service to have online especially for budget travellers like myself. And later on talking to Chuck, we realised that if we had a cell phone component, if you could send an SMS into our service whenever you split a bill, you wouldn't even have to carry that book around. So we actually quit our jobs from Amazon last year in August and launched the site in mid-January. People are using the site for travelling as we intended but for lots of other things like room mates splitting wedding gifts, birthday gifts, concert tickets, all sorts of stuff.

JASON: So the library is a place where these groups of friends literally list the things like CDs, or books or DVDs that they have lent to each other. And also you have a facility where people can actually put up a little list of recent things that they've bought that they might want to lend out to their circle of friends.

GAURAV: With the library we actually intended it very pragmatically: I lend you a book, I don't want to forget so I'll just note it in the system. But then we realised that if you have been through the trouble of actually adding that book, why not we keep a list around of all the books you own? That way later on your friends can log in and see hey what books does Gaurav have? Maybe I want to borrow something. Then we expanded this to say hey maybe when you log on, you can see everything that all your friends have and search for things in there. So the cool result of this is you have this ad hoc community lending library forming.

JASON: You've been online like you've said for 6 months or so. So you have got some statistics about the people who are using the site. Is it a global thing? Are lots of people round the world using Bill Monk?

GAURAV: Yes, when we launched we only supported the US dollar as far as currencies go. Today we support well over 50 currencies with 30 actively in use. So what we found is about 75% of all bills still occur in the US dollar so we are very US-heavy still but we are growing elsewhere. The UK, we have a lot of users recording bills in British pounds as well as in the Euro. Probably our fastest growing areas are India and China, India is a little bit faster. And then we have got people as from far off places as Kazakhstan using the website. It's great to see how quickly it's spread all over the world. And it is also interesting to see how this problem of borrowing and lending money and stuff pervades or supersedes all cultures.

主持人："既非借入者亦非出借者"，这是莎士比亚名剧《哈姆雷特》中，父亲对他的儿子讲的话。但事实上，在家庭生活和朋友交往中到处充斥着借入与借出的关系。我们有谁不曾向朋友借过一本书、一张唱片或是一些钱呢，又有谁不曾借过这些东西给别人呢？然而，凭以往的经验我可以很确定的说，我们大多都有过忘记归还的时候，这自然会导致人们之间关系紧张。现在，最新的社交网站可以让借入与借出变得更加容易，至少他们是这样声称的。BillMonk为你和朋友们提供了机会，在线记录你借过的所有东西。这样一来，如果你需要那张唱片，可是又忘记谁借走了它，你和你的朋友们可以上线查询，把它找出来。但这会不会威胁到朋友间的信任呢？"文化冲突"的杰森·菲普斯对话BillMonk的创建者之一高拉夫·奥博洛伊，第一个问题是，创办这样一个网站的主意是从哪里来的？

高拉夫：2004年我和三个朋友要到欧洲做九天的旅行，下飞机前我们决定，我们应该明了所有需要分担的账目，比如电影票、火车票、饭费等等。我们的确这样做了。所以每遇上大的花销都会记在本子上，回来以后，我把所有的数据汇总到一起，用电子邮件发给其他人，大家就这样传来传去进行修改和补充，然后算出了最终的数目，通过支票进行结算。这的确非常有用，因为最后我们发现有几百美元需要重新分担。最棒的是，旅途中我们可以放心地掏出信用卡来付账，也不用为了分摊账单而中途在自动提款机上取出大量现金。当时我就想，要是在网上提供这项服务肯定不错，尤其是对于像我这样事先有预算的旅行者。后来我跟恰克聊了这件事，我们意识到如果把手机也包含进来，那么，每当你想分摊账目的时候只要发个短信就可以了，连记事本都省了。于是，去年八月，我们辞掉了在亚马逊网站的工作，一月中旬创办了我们的网站。人们在旅行的时候用它，这跟我们预想的一样，但还有很多其它用途，像是同屋之间分摊结婚礼物、生日礼物、音乐会门票的费用等等。

杰森：那么，"图书馆"这个地方，就是供一群朋友如实记下各自借出的东西，包括CD、书籍、DVD。还有一项便利的功能，人们可以列出一个清单，展示新近购买的、愿意跟朋友分享的物品。

高拉夫："图书馆"的设计开始是出于实用主义的目的，我借给你一本书，我不想忘了这事儿，所以把它写进系统。但后来我们意识到，如果你真的有可能记不得那本书，那我们干嘛不给你所有的书列个清单呢？这样当你的朋友登陆的时候就可以看看，高拉夫都有些什么书，没准儿有我想借的。把这个想法推而广之，当你登陆的时候，你可以看到朋友们的所有收藏，在其中找寻想要的东西。最后我们就得到了这个很酷的成果，一个社区共享的"图书馆"，拥有所有可外借物品的清单。

杰森：就像你说过的，这个网站已经在线工作六个月左右了。那么你应该对使用网站的人做一些统计。你们的网站具有全球性么？是不是世界各地有很多人都在使用BillMonk?

高拉夫：是的，最初创建的时候在货币流通上我们只支持美元。如今货币的种类增加到了50多种，其中30种的使用率都很高。我们发现75%的账单是美元的，这说明我们在美国的客户仍然最多，但在其它地方也有所增长。比如在英国，我们有很多账目是用英镑结算的，也有很多用欧元。我们业务发展最快的地区大概是印度和中国，其中印度还要更快一些。还有一些用户来自更遥远的国度，像哈萨克斯坦。看到我们的网站这么快就传播到世界各地，真是太棒了。同时我们也觉得很有意思，看来借钱借物所带来的麻烦是"超文化"的，在任何地方都很普遍。