Week 5 GVRL

What an extensive title list! Whew! After checking the complete list I chose "Company Profiles for Students." The table of contents was twice as long as the title list so another search was on for a company to research. American Greetings was a name I was familiar with so I clicked in. The top of the page gave the editors, the volume, publisher, copyright, and page numbers. All pertinent information followed, around 16 subjects and 3 great sidebars one of which listed some fast facts. The year is 1999 but did you know :

Americans spend more than $6 billion a year on greeting cards and related social expression products, sending more than seven billion greeting cards to loved ones?

Christmas, Valentine's Day (Happy Heart day on Tuesday), and Easter are the top three card-sending holidays?

They employ over 21,000 people in 100,000 retail stores in 75 countries.
What would you use this info for? Maybe you are interested in buying stock or thinking about a job with one of the companies. Everything you need to know is listed. Again, maybe you are just curious like me. There is a phone number to get the annual report so I am guessing the money end of the company could be very current. Agreed, you don't get much exercise looking high and low for what is available because it is all at your fingertips.
This site is a research mecca. Seems almost every subject in High School or College is covered. If you need the most current info you would just choose another one of our databases.
For the general search I wanted to see if there was anything about how mercury in dental fillings affects your health. That term gave me 0 hits so I shortened it to "Mercury in dental fillings" and got 14. "Mercury alone gave me 471 which obviously was  too broad. The words in your search are shown in red throughout the articles. I found this helpful for quickly looking over the info. I think the "Previous Searches" tab also helps you cut down on time. If you trust it, then you don't have to write it all down , just "Bookmark" it. Isn't the "Dictionary" tab great too? Why not have complete availability to all reference materials on one site!! I can barely fathom how long it took to scan all these books. "Listening" reminds me a bit of how we used to have to read those SRA books with sentences from a book flashing rather quickly on the chalk board. (yes, I am sort of old) It is interesting how words between punctuation marks are highlighted in one solid color then as it is read, each word is highlighted with another color. Besides having it read to you there is the option of downloading, printing or emailing it so you can put together exactly what you need and then organize it at a later time.
When checking other posts I find it interesting most like to pick topics of interest to them instead of something random. We are beginning to feel comfortable with the search and try out many of the tabs on the pages we aren't asked to. Exploration seems to be the name of the game.