Newspaper

A newspaper is a printed periodical whose purpose is to deliver news and other information in an up-to-date, factual manner. In some countries as many as nine out of ten adults read at least one newspaper a day. Seen in purely business terms, few products can ever have been so successful in reaching as much of their market. Why do so many people read newspapers?

There are five basic functions of a newspaper: to inform, to comment, to persuade, to instruct and to entertain. You may well think that this list of functions is in order of importance but, if so, you would not be in agreement with the majority of the reading public. Of the two broad categories of newspaper, the popular and the quality, the former has a readership of millions, while the latter, only hundreds of thousands. Yet the popular papers seem largely designed for entertainment. They contain a lot of comment and persuasive language. The quality newspapers put a much higher value on information and a much lower one on entertainment.

It is not only in content that the two kinds of paper differ. There is a difference, too, in the style in which the articles are written. The popular papers generally use more dramatic language with a lot of word-play. Their reporters tend to use shorter sentences and avoid less well-known vocabulary. This means that popular newspapers are easier for a native speaker to understand, though probably not for a non-native speaker.

In order to decide whether a newspaper is a quality or a popular one it is not even necessary to read it, since you can tell simply by the way it looks. Popular papers are generally smaller with fewer and shorter articles. But they have bigger headlines and more photographs.

Out of 500, ______ adults read a newspaper every day according to the passage.