Прочитайте тексты и установите соответствие между текстами А–G и заголовками 1–8. В ответ запишите цифры, в порядке, соответствующем буквам. Используйте каждую цифру только один раз. В задании есть один лишний заголовок.
1. Traditional delivery
2. Loss of popularity
3. Money above privacy
4. The best-known newspapers
5. Focus on different readers
6. The successful competitor
7. Size makes a difference
8. Weekend reading
A. As in many other European countries, Britain’s main newspapers are losing their readers. Fewer and fewer people are buying broadsheets and tabloids at the newsagent’s. In the last quarter of the twentieth century people became richer and now they can choose other forms of leisure activity. Also, there is the Internet which is a convenient and inexpensive alternative source of news.
B. The ‘Sunday papers’ are so called because that is the only day on which they are published. Sunday papers are usually thicker than the dailies and many of them have six or more sections. Some of them are ‘sisters’ of the daily newspapers. It means they are published by the same company but not on week days.
C. Another proof of the importance of ‘the papers’ is the morning ‘paper round’. Most newsagents organise these. It has become common that more than half of the country’s readers get their morning paper brought to their door by a teenager. The boy or girl usually gets up at around 5:30 a.m. every day including Sunday to earn a bit of pocket money.
D. The quality papers or broadsheets are for the better educated readers. They devote much space to politics and other ‘serious’ news. The popular papers, or tabloids, sell to a much larger readership. They contain less text and a lot more pictures. They use bigger headlines and write in a simpler style of English. They concentrate on ‘human interest stories’ which often means scandal.
E. Not so long ago in Britain if you saw someone reading a newspaper you could tell what kind it was without even checking the name. It was because the quality papers were printed on very large pages called ‘broadsheet’. You had to have expert turning skills to be able to read more than one page. The tabloids were printed on much smaller pages which were much easier to turn.
F. The desire to attract more readers has meant that in the twentieth century sometimes even the broadsheets in Britain look rather ‘popular’. They give a lot of coverage to scandal and details of people’s private lives. The reason is simple. What matters most for all newspaper publishers is making a profit. They would do anything to sell more copies.
G. If you go into any newsagent’s shop in Britain you will not find only newspapers. You will also see rows and rows of magazines for almost every imaginable taste. There are specialist magazines for many popular pastimes. There are around 3,000 of them published in the country and they are widely read, especially by women. Magazines usually list all the TV and radio programmes for the coming week and many British readers prefer them to newspapers.