Pay attention to the following personal and company names

1. What is the modern way of collecting signatures?

2. What kind of web-site is Change.org?

3. Why did Lauren Todd start a petition? Where? How did J.C. Penney stores react to her petition?

4. What is John Noone? What is his reaction to the petitions?

5. Did any other seller suffer from the petitions?

6. What is Robin Sackin? What does he think of the matter?

Translate the report from English into Russian. Deliver the report to the audience.

Script

The modern way to collect signatures on a petition requires no paper or pen or standing on a street for hours. All it requires is going online.

Change.org is a social action website where people around the world can start or sign online petitions. The top causes range from animal protection to criminal justice to women's rights.

There are many different reasons why people start petitions at the site. Lauren Todd of New York told CBS television that she started a petition a few months ago after she saw a picture of a girls shirt on Facebook. The shirt read: "I'm too pretty to do homework, so my brother has to do it for me."

LAUREN TODD: "It was outrageous enough to be posted on Facebook, but it was actually more outrageous than that, and I felt like I needed to do something about it."

Ms. Todd's petition urged shoppers to boycott J.C. Penney stores until they stopped selling shirts with what she called sexist messages.

Five hours later, Shelby Knox started tweeting about the petition to her thousands of Twitter followers. Ms. Knox is the director of women's rights organizing for Change.org. Some of her followers also started tweeting about the shirt and signing the petition.

SHELBY KNOX: "From the time that Lauren started the petition on Change.org and J.C. Penney pulled the shirt, it was about ten hours, in which it got over two thousand signatures and at one point was generating over four hundred tweets a minute."

Ms. Knox said that with each new signature, an e-mail automatically went to J.C. Penney's public relations team. Another went to the company's chief. J.C. Penney, without comment, discontinued the shirts.

Clothing designer John Noone has worked with a number of large stores. He says he has always used words like "pretty" or "princess" when he creates shirts for girls.

JOHN NOONE: "Because it's easy to do, I guess it's just so ingrained in our culture that just it's an easy sale. It's going to be easier to sell a shirt that says, you know, 'My little princess' than, uh, 'My A student.'"

Mr. Noone says fashion designers find their ideas in many places. It could be a celebrity's tweet or something said on a TV show.

JOHN NOONE: "And if you think it's funny and the designer thinks it's funny and the buyer thinks it's funny, then it, you know, it makes it to the store."

But now, with the Internet, consumers who take offense can do more than just write an angry letter to the company.

Another clothing seller, Forever 21, got in trouble not long after J.C. Penney. Forever 21 was selling a girl's shirt that read "Allergic to Algebra." It stopped selling them the day after the story spread.

Robin Sackin is a professor at New York's Fashion Institute of Technology. She thinks people should not get so angry. Children are influenced by their parents, she says, not the words on a shirt.

ROBIN SACKIN: "So if my child says to me 'Mommy, I want to get that,' I've said, 'OK, you can have it, but just remember something -- I don't care if you're pretty, you're doing your homework.'"

V. Translator’s Communicative Competence

Nowadays many people communicate on-line. Public bodies as well as business could not but react to this phenomenon, so e-petitioning is becoming more and more popular. There are numerous websites collecting various petitions including those which cover the issues of business ethics and social responsibility.

A petition is a request to do something, most commonly addressed to a government official or public entity. Petitions to a deity are a form of prayer. A petition may be oral rather than written, and in this era may be transmitted via the Internet. E-petitions is an easy way for you to influence a government body or a business.