In a year that featured one of history's biggest corporate buyouts, a stock-market surge reminiscent of the dot-com bubble and an American energy boom that kept on booming, there was plenty to write about in the business world.
buyout：收购，买断 reminiscent：怀旧的，回忆往事的
But what did Wall Street Journal readers want to read about? Here's a clue: Look for the things that bring us all together.
Yes, it's shopping. The Journal's most-viewed business article on WSJ.com for 2013 was "The Dirty Secret of Black Friday 'Discounts'" which showed that while the biggest day of the retail year looks like a great deal for consumers, with stores offering huge discounts to lure them through the doors, many of those discounts are an illusion.
illusion：幻觉，错觉
Prices are first set artificially high, with a heavy discount baked in to bring them down to the real price that was planned for all along. Is there nothing we can believe in anymore?
artificially：人工地，不自然地
One of the great unifiers in life is that we all love to eat, and this was reflected in the year's most popular stories. "IRS Rule Leads Restaurants to Rethink Automatic Tips" showed how an updated rule from the Internal Revenue Service means restaurants must treat tips added automatically to a customer's check as regular wages, and subject to the same tax rules.
The extra paperwork and costs associated with the change has restaurant chains planning to stop the now-common practice of adding an automatic tip to the tabs of big groups.
While diners might appreciate getting to add their own tip, in 2013 they also lost a beautiful combination, as we reported in "Heinz Ketchup Loses Access to the World's Most Famous Fries." After the takeover of Heinz by investors including Brazil's 3G Capital, the company got a new CEO: Brazilian Bernardo Hees, who also serves on the board of Burger King, another 3G portfolio company. That was enough to have McDonald's announcing that the world's best-known ketchup would be removed from its restaurants globally.
What else brings readers together, aside from food? The aura of Apple continued in 2013, with two of the site's best-read business stories covering the company. Readers flocked to "Apple Tests iPhoneScreens as Large as Six Inches," which reported the company is considering literally bigger things: Smartphones with screens up to six inches, which would make them among the biggest on the market.
aura：光环，气氛
Apple's year in the news went well beyond its gleaming new products though—its enormous cash reserves, and the complex efforts undertaken to keep them out of reach of U.S. tax collectors, also pulled in the readers. Our live blog of CEO Tim Cook's appearance before a Senate committee investigating tax avoidance by U.S. multinationals was a big hit.
tax avoidance：避税 multinational：跨国公司
And when it comes to cellphones and the Internet, it isn't just Apple that we love to read about. The tech and telecom industries at large were responsible for plenty of the year's best-read stories.
"Google Jet Fleet Loses a Pentagon Fuel Perk" reported a little-known arrangement between the founders of Google and the U.S. Department of Defense, which allowed the tech billionaires to fuel their private jets with highly-subsidized jet fuel purchased from a NASA research center at an airport close to Google's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters. The deal has since come to an end.
So too have subsidies for millions of mobile users. "Millions Improperly Claimed U.S. Phone Subsidies" showed a government program to provide phone service to low-income Americans may have been abused by millions of recipients, who were either unable or unwilling to provide the paperwork needed to prove their eligibility. Spending on the program rose from $819 million in 2008 to about $2.2 billion in 2012, as more wireless carriers began promoting the service—and reaping the rewards.
subsidies：补助金，补贴，津贴 recipients：收件人 eligibility：合格，资格 reaping the rewards：坐享其成