Fill the gaps in the sentences using these key words from the text

Widespread; facilities; sedentary; decline; pastime;

balanced; survey; reluctant ; multitask; essential.

1. If you ____________, you do more than one thing at the same time.

2. If something is ____________, it happens or exists in many places.

3. A ____________ life is one in which all parts combine well together and exist in the correct amounts.

4. A ____________ is a set of questions that you ask a large number of people.

5. ____________ are things such as rooms or pieces of equipment provided at a place for people to use.

6. A ____________ is a reduction in the amount or quality of something.

7. If something is ____________, it is completely necessary.

8. A ____________ is something people do regularly for fun in their free time.

9. If you are ____________ to do something, you don’t want to do it.

10. If an activity is described as ____________, it involves a lot of sitting and not much exercise.

Look in the text and find this information as quickly as possible

1. What percentage of British children watch TV in bed at night?

2. How much time on average do British children spend in front of a screen each day?

3. How many children read books in their own time each day?

4. How many children did the survey interview?

5. What percentage of five to 16-year olds use the Internet?

6. How much time on average do children spend online (on the Internet)?

4. Are these statements True (T) or False (F) according to the text?

1. Boys often watch more than one TV program at the same time.

2. The rise in Internet use is mainly the result of social networking sites.

3. The number of children watching television is falling steadily.

4. Less than half the children surveyed watch TV while they are eating their evening meal.

5. The survey is conducted every 14 years.

6. Many children watch TV and use a laptop at the same time.

5.Match the verbs in the left-hand column with the nouns in the right-hand column to make collocations

1. visit a. facilities

2. turn on b. the Internet

3. improve c. a magazine

4. flick through d. attention

5. make e. a survey

6. use f. a choice

7. pay g. a website

8. conduct h. the television

UNIT 9

MOBILE PHONES HAVE TRANSFORMED THE WAY WE COMMUNICATE

Answer these questions and then talk about your answers in class

1. Do you have a mobile phone?

2. Did you have a mobile phone five / 10 / 15 years ago?

3. Do you know anyone between the ages of 18 and 60 who does not have a mobile phone?

4. How many mobile phones are there in your home?

Read the text

1. In just 25 years, the mobile phone has transformed the way we communicate on New Year’s Day, 1985, Michael Harrison phoned his father, Sir Ernest, to wish him a happy new year. Sir Ernest was chairman of Racal Electronics, the owner of Vodafone, and his son was making the first-ever mobile phone call in the UK.

2. Later that morning, comedian Ernie Wise made a very public mobile phone call from St Katherine’s Dock, east London, to announce that Vodafone was now open for business. A few days later, its only rival, Cellnet, a joint venture between BT and Securicor, was in business.

3. At the time, mobile phones weighed almost a kilogram, cost several thousand pounds and, in some cases, provided only 20 minutes talktime. The networks themselves were small; Vodafone had just a dozen masts covering London and the area west of London, while Cellnet started with a single mast, stuck on the BT Tower. Neither company had any idea of the huge potential of wireless communication and the dramatic impact that mobile phones would have over the next quarter century.

4. “We projected there would only be about a million ever sold and we would get about 35 % of the market and BT projected there would be about half a million and they would get about 80 % of the market,” remembers Sir Christopher Gent, former Vodafone chief executive who was at St Katherine’s Dock a quarter of a century ago. “In the first year, we sold about 15,000 to 20,000 phones. The portable Motorola was about 3,000 but most of the phones we sold were car phones from companies such as Panasonic and Nokia.”

5. Hardly anyone believed there would come a day when mobile phones were so popular that there would be more phones in the UK than there are people. But in 1999 one mobile phone was sold in the UK every four seconds, and by 2004 there were more mobile phones in the UK than people. The boom was a result of increased competition – which pushed prices lower and created innovations in the way that mobiles were sold, which helped put them within the reach of the mass market – and the move to digital technology.

6. In 1986 BT did something which was to change the way that mobile phones were sold in the UK. “We started subsidizing handsets and bringing down the price of phones,” Sir Christopher recalls. Ever since then, the mobile phone networks have subsidized the price of a phone, hoping to recover the costs over the lifetime of a customer’s contract. Cellnet also changed its prices, reducing its monthly charge and relying instead on actual call charges. It also introduced local call tariffs.

7. But there was still a basic block to mobile phones going mass market: not enough capacity. “But when digital came along, that really opened up the market,” said Sir Christopher.

8. When the government introduced more competition, companies started cutting prices to attract more customers. The campaign, “The future’s bright, the future’s Orange”, created by Wolff Olins, and the introduction of such novelties as per second and itemized billing helped give Orange a strong position in the market. In 1999, Virgin Mobile had a big success with the new idea of pre-pay phones.

9. The way that handsets themselves were marketed was also changing and it was Finland’s Nokia who made the leap from phones as technology to phones as fashion items with the Nokia 3210 device.

10. The Nokia 3210 is iconic because it is the first phone that deliberately did not display any sort of external aerial. In the late 1990s Nokia realized that the mobile phone was a fashion item: so it offered interchangeable covers which allowed you to customize and personalize your handset.

11. The mobile phone industry has spent the later part of the past decade trying to persuade people to do more with their phones than just call and text, culminating in the fight between the iPhone and a succession of touch screen rivals – including Google’s Nexus One.

12. John Cunliffe, chief technology officer at Ericsson in north-west Europe, believes the next wave of growth for mobile telephony will come not from persuading more people to get a phone – because many already have one – but connecting machines to wireless networks. Everything from company vehicles and smart electric and water meters to people’s fridge freezers will one day be able to communicate.

13. “At the moment there are 4.5 billion handsets worldwide. At Ericsson we believe there will be 50 billion by 2020,” reckons Cunliffe. “This is all about machine-to-machine communication, touching all aspects of our lives.”

Date: 2015-12-17; view: 2032