MEGHAN YOUNG is a professional Instagram star. She gets paid to climb beautiful mountains, photograph their glittering (闪闪发光的) summits and post about her adventures to her fans.
Young graduated from Seattle University’s school of Law in 2015. But she decided she didn’t want to become a lawyer. Her parents were shocked by the decision. “They were worried about what I was going to do,” Young says. “How was I going to find career stability?”
But her legal skills haven’t gone to waste. Once companies express an interest in working with her, there’s the tough task of negotiating the terms (条款) of the deal. And the work is still unfinished even after she’s done take the photos. When Young returns from her adventures, she carefully edits the images and writes captions to go along with them. Once the posts are public, businesses sometimes don’t pay on time. That's when she needs to follow up. Her least favorite problem is when she discovers that a company has used her photos in a way that violates the terms of the contract.That usually leads to time-consuming email exchanges.
Social media influencing is not as effortless as it seems. The stress it creates even has its own name: creator burnout (精疲力竭) . Young used to obsessively check her post’s performance, which she says will “drive you crazy”, so she stopped. But if she doesn’t reply, people will stop commenting.Without that engagement on her posts, brands won’t want to keep paying her. Therefore, she had to accept the fact that she’ll be tethered (拴住) to her phone as long as she’s in this line of work.
Beyond the day-to- day headaches of a career online, social media’s inherent (固有的) uncertainly also poses problems for creators. There are times when Young is staring at the calendar without another project in the works. In the long term, it can be risky to focus a career on a single platform, or even on social media itself.
Yet Young says it’s all been worth it, because the sponsorship allow her to spend much of her life in the mountains. Her ideal day starts with unzipping her tent at dawn so she can take pictures of the sunrise reflecting on snowy summits around her. Few jobs in the world would allow her to do that so consistently (一贯地) .
【小题1】What is paragraph 3 mainly about?| A．The main work involved in being an Instagram influencer. |
| B．The difficulties that every Instagram star will meet. |
| C．How to deal with dishonest companies. |
| D．How Meghan Young’s legal skills help her work. |
| A．there are a lot of tough tasks when dealing with sponsors. |
| B．the work of photo-taking and image-editing is difficult to handle. |
| C．it is stressful to check one’s phone and to interact with fans all the time. |
| D．the income is unstable and the career prospects are uncertain. |
| A．Bored. | B．Worried. |
| C．Satisfied | D．Confident. |
| A．Meghan Young’s decision to be a full-time influencer was supported by her parents. |
| B．It happens frequently that Meghan Young doesn’t get paid on time. |
| C．It is impossible for Instagram influencers to put down their phones. |
| D．In order to increase their influence, creators have to keep a good relationship with fans. |
