ONLINE SHOPPING SPREE SETS RECORD Chinese shoppers spent billions online yesterday as they took advantage of discounts offered on Singles Day (November 11). It is a festival for young single people to celebrate by eating together, sending gifts or going shopping, thus seized on by online retailers to increase sales. It took only 13 hours for sales on just two online sites, Taobao and Tmall, to fly past last year's overall total of 19.1 billion yuan (US$3.1 billion).The final figure of Singles Day reached an astonishing 35.02 billion yuan as hundreds of thousands of consumers rushed to buy clothes, furniture, and home decoration items at discount prices. What friends and colleagues greeted each other with that day was “Bought anything today?” as they exchanged tales of bargains or disappointing news of popular items sold out minutes after the spree began at midnight. In under nine hours, turnover at the Alibaba Group's Tmall and Taobao sites had exceeded that of last year's Cyber Monday, a similar event in the United States. “We hope other e-commerce sites also did a good job as we want Singles Day to be a holiday for consumers and a good chance for retailers to discover the unmet needs of shoppers,” Jack Ma, founder and chairman of Alibaba Group, told reporters. “It's not a difficult thing to bring our total transaction size to 100 billion yuan in a couple of years but we hope to do more to help vendors and manufacturers to upgrade their products and service to reach more clients,” Ma said at a news briefing.

1. Online retailers took hold of the shopping spree to increase sales successfully.() 2. The final figure of Singles Day for this year reached 19.1 billion yuan.()

3. Cyber Monday is a similar event in the Great Britain.()

4. Other e-commerce sites did as well as Alibaba Group on Singles Day.()

5. Jack Ma's goal of transaction size is to reach 100 billion yuan in several years.()