VOA标准英语2010年-Website of the Week - World Bank Data（在线收听）

Time again for our Website of the Week, when we showcase interesting and innovative online destinations.

The World Bank lends money to promote development, and to help achieve its goals it collects a lot of data. For years, the World Bank has been one of the world's leading collectors of data. All kinds of information: life expectancy, literacy rates, unemployment, exports, water pollution — the list is nearly endless.

Now, a new World Bank website brings those numbers together in one place.

"The data website is the central platform for all of the development data from the Bank, and the focus of this is to make the data open, accessible, and searchable," explained World Bank spokesman Richard Fix.

The bank's data group has just launched data.worldbank.org, where you can see all the metrics for a given country, or compare different countries on the same indicator.

"Social and health, education, to trade, the economy, environment. Data on all of these different topics for all countries, and in some cases going back as far as 1960," Fix said.

There are also maps and other tools, but Fix says the site's real strength is that users can download and manipulate the data, not just browse it passively.

"You get people who are quite handy with the systems and developing applications, and they use the data and mash-up the data with other pieces of data and raise questions that maybe haven't been raised before, or point to answers that we hadn't seen before."

World development indicators online at data.worldbank.org, or get the link to this and hundreds of other Websites of the Week from our site, voanews.com.