## Step 2a - Reading

#### UK leads world in mobile web use

This article from the Guardian Weekly is about the latest entertainment and communication technology that is popular in the UK.

- First read the text.
- Study the vocabulary.
- Do the exercise.

Read the text.

Britain has become a gadget-obsessed nation. Watching more television online and using smartphones and tablets to access the web more than any of the world’s leading economies, according to new research. The British love of the latest devices has even seen the UK overtake Japan in mobile internet use, according to the UK media regulator Ofcom. The research compared data across 17 countries, including the US, China, India, Russia, Brazil, Sweden, France and Germany. An obsession with Facebook, Twitter and Gangnam-style clips on YouTube has seen UK consumers download 424 megabytes of data each per month on their smartphones and tablets. The figure is almost 60% more than a year ago. Much of the increase in use of mobile devices, especially smartphones, has been driven by the popularity of social networking sites such as Facebook and Twitter. Now 40% of UK adults accessing their profiles on the go. British 18–to-24-year-olds are the world’s top mobile social networkers, with 62% accessing their profiles from smartphones and tablets. UK internet users spent an average of 728 minutes (more than 12 hours) a week online in total, although this is a slight drop from the 746 minutes recorded in the last report. The British love of the latest gadgets is also seen in the changing face of the living room. Almost 24% of TVs sold in the UK in the first quarter of this year were “super large” – bigger than 84 cm. The popularity of video-on-demand services such as the BBC’s iPlayer has made Britons the most likely to watch, or catch up with, TV online. Almost a quarter of Britons use an online catch up TV service each week, ahead of secondplaced US on 17%. Despite the rise of digital technology, good oldfashioned linear TV viewing is showing no signs of losing its popularity. TV viewing in the UK has remained stable at 242 minutes — more than four hours per person daily. Bron: original article by Mark Sweney Guardia weekly, rewritten by Janet Hardy-Gould.

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