Description: This is
a VOA Special English Economics Report.
See text below
Text:
American children and teenagers have increased their
use of entertainment media by more than one hour a
day in the last five years. On an average day they
now spend seven and a half hours using media. These
are the findings of a new survey. It included
devices like TVs, computers, mobile phones and MP3
players, but also media like books and magazines. It
did not count media use for school.
Vicky Rideout at the Kaiser Family Foundation, a
health research group, wrote the report. She was
surprised that kids could fit even more media time
into their day. She found that they spent ten hours
and forty-five minutes if you counted each device
individually.
But children multi-task a lot, and Vicky Rideout
says this is not necessarily a good thing. She says:
"People who study the brain will tell you that you
can't actually multi-task in that way. Youre really
switching back and forth sequentially from different
tasks, just doing it rapidly. And you dont really do
either task as well as you would do them if you did
them one at a time."
The study suggests a link between heavy media use
and lower performance in school. About one-fourth of
those who used media the least reported that their
grades were mostly average or below. But that was
true of half the heavy media users. So where are the
parents? Children who had any rule limiting the use
of any kind of media were exposed to an average of
about three hours less media a day. But only
one-third of children had to follow any rules. Girls
spent more time than boys on social networking
sites, listening to music and reading. Boys spent
more time on video games -- an average of
forty-eight minutes more a day than girls.
Some other findings: Time spent reading books has
not dropped in the last five years. But time with
newspapers and magazines has, though some reading
now takes place online.
Blacks and Hispanics use media over four hours more
a day than other groups. And for all children, media
use appears to reach its highest point between the
ages of eleven and fourteen. Vicky Rideout will try
to explain these findings in future research.
The report is based on more than two thousand
students ages eight to eighteen. They took a written
survey in class through May of last year.
And that's the VOA Special English Economics Report.
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Hi. I
personally reviewed this video and found it appropriate for
the news section of English Global Group. This
is a Voice of America video which covers an interesting
topic in Special English. I would appreciate some feedback from both
students and teachers about this video. You can comment in
the window below using any of a number of different services
including Facebook, Yahoo, AOL, and Hotmail.
