Careful Reading
Read the following passages carefully. Decide on the best answer and choose the corresponding letter.
British newspapers can be classified into groups according to various criteria, such as area of distribution, size of sales, socioeconomic class of their readers, days (and times) of publication, and political bias. Each of these different criteria will lead to more or less different groupings.
With regard to the area of distribution a fairly clear distinction can be made between national papers and local papers. The national, e.g. The Times, Daily Mirror and Sunday Express, are readily obtainable in virtually all parts of the United Kingdom at the same time. On the other hand, local papers, e.g. Yorkshire Post or Liverpool Echo, serve a particular area, and outside that area must be specially ordered.
As regards the sales figures, we must recognize that there is no clear line that will distinguish between large and small sales. However, we make a somewhat arbitrary distinction here, partly based on copies sold, but also influenced by the type of content of the papers. This separates the so-called “popular” papers from the “quality” papers: the “qualities”, like Sunday Times or Financial Times, tend to have larger, more serious articles than the “populars”, such as The People or News of the World.
Regarding the socioeconomic class of the readers, a classification on these lines will to a large extent reflect the above distinction into quality and popular. This is because the quality papers are mostly intended for the upper income groups, while the popular papers find their readers among the lower socioeconomic groups. Thus, a reader of The Observer or Financial Times, which are quality papers, is likely to be an educated person with quite a good income, while a reader of Daily Mail or The Sun is more likely to be a less well-educated person with a lower income.
As to the days of publication, most British papers are either so-called “daily papers”, (which in fact do not appear on Sundays), e.g. The Guardian or The Scotsman, or Sunday papers, like Sunday Times or News of the world. Local papers with small circulations, however, might appear only once or twice a week, or even less frequently, depending on the demand for them. Concerning the time of publication, the vast majority are morning papers, i.e. they go on sale early in the morning, while the minority are the so-called “evening” papers, whose sales might start as early as midday, and then continue until the evening.
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