英语北师大版选修8 Unit24 Lesson 1 Consumer Society (warm up)PPT.ppt

★ Read magazine articles and letters to a newspaper. use reading strategies for summarising. ★ Write a discursive essay. ★ Learn about complex sentences used for persuasion. Tape-script: A recent report on British society has shown that most Britons live longer, are healthier, better educated and much richer than twenty years ago. However, we work longer hours and are much more worried about crime than ever before. Our standard of living has risen and the average income of British families is now nearly ￡550 a week, compared with ￡326 in 1981, which is a considerable rise even when taking into account inflation. The percentage of households with cars has climbed from 62% to 72%, while the number with central heating has increased from 61% to 90%. The percentage of households with computers has rocketed dramatically from around 3% to over 40%. Not everybody has benefited though and there are much greater inequalities than twenty years ago, the top 20% are much richer – they now have 46% of the nations’ wealth compared with around 35% in 1981. the bottom 20% of society are now relatively much poorer and their share of the nations’ wealth has declined from 10% to 6%. Problems like begging and homelessness are on the increase. Life expectancy has gone up steadily. In 1981, British men could expect to live around 70 years and British women on average 75 years. Now men live 74 years and women 79. Over the last twenty years, unemployment has fluctuated but has gone down recently. It went up from around 1.7 million in 1981 to 2.1 million in 1989 only to fall beneath a million in the spring of 2001. However, we work much longer hours than before, in fact the longest in Europe. There are many more women working than before– nearly 72% compared with 57% in 1981, the highest figure in Europe. However, on average women still only earn 80% of that earned by men. Britons are better educated than twenty years ago, at least in theory. Now nearly 60% of 16—18 year olds