Cover of the textbook Outcomes Advanced - Student's Book

The key answer of exercise 2

The key to exercise solutions in chapter 5 - It came highly recommended for the textbook Outcomes Advanced - Student's Book with authors Carol Nuttall and Amanda French from National Geographic Learning

Question

Listen to a radio feature about the explosive growth of book clubs. Find what evidence is given of.

Answer

  1. Every year Zuckerberg makes his New Year’s Resolutions public and they have included: only eating meat that he’d killed himself, learning Mandarin Chinese, and trying to meet a different new person who wasn’t an employee every single day.
  2. It makes a huge difference to sales. (For example, Purchases of The End Of Power by Venezuelan journalist Moisés Naím rocketed after it was chosen as the first title for consideration, with the book jumping to the top of Amazon’s economics chart overnight!)
  3. Social media has influenced reading habits quite a lot. (For example, people use hashtags like amreading / fridayreads to share what they’re reading on Twitter.) Also, mobile phones have created a mobile reading revolution across the developing world (according to one study, 62% now read more as books are easier to access online / there are things like the Africa-wide cell phone book clubs).
  4. If you’d googled ‘book club’ back in 2003, it would’ve returned around 400,000 hits; try it today and you’re guaranteed more than 30 million! (In Britain alone, there are now an estimated 40,000 reading groups – including lots of specialist groups such as the vegan book club and socialist feminist groups.)
  5. If, for instance, each of the 40,000 reading groups in the UK has around ten members and picks perhaps six books a year, then that’s 60 books per club – and almost two and a half million sales – per year. Before you even factor in the power of Facebook.
  6. Not everyone sees them in a positive light. Critic Brian Sewer sees them as gossiping circles or dating clubs in disguise. (He also thinks the discussions are trivial and shallow and that there’s too much reading of cheap sentimental autobiographies.)
  7. One book club favourite, Reading Lolita in Tehran, by Azar Nafisi, details the transformational experience of reading and discussing frequently banned Western books in the Iranian capital in the 1990s.