Scenario:
I am a mother of 2 small children, 5 and 7 years old. When suddenly I have started to notice that my children really don't go and play outside anymore. All they ever want to do is watch SpongeBob or one of those silly shows that are on TV now. I tell them that they have to go outside and get fresh air and the sad thing is that when they go outside they soon ask how long they have to be out there because they want to go back inside and catch another show they may be missing. I want to take this up with TV program. I would like to tell them that they are getting too many people involved in TV and that it is not good especially for children. They should be outside running around because that is what kids their age should be doing. Not sitting in the house eating some popcorn or having a snack while watching another rerun that they have seen a hundred million times! I would like to tell the company that maybe they should show broadcast’s that get kids involved or tell them that they should go outside and get some exercise because kids that age are still growing and they shouldn’t grow up watching television, because if they do that is what they are going to do the rest of their life and I do not want that.
Speech:
As many of you may have noticed, the amount of people watching television every day continues to increase day by day. Instead of going outside and playing a game of ball or playing a game of tag kids are now sitting inside on the couch right in front of the television. This needs to stop, if we continue to let children just sit inside the house and watch TV or playvideo games all day long what is going to happen when they grow up? They will not know what to do, or what to do with their children.
While we are talking about children, another thing that we should be looking at is besides that fact that many of them are watching television more than they should be, many kids also “snack” while they watch and or play. This is a problem that we should focus on also. Sitting on couches or in your favorite chair are not going to give you any exercise and snacking is not going to help. If you keep on eating, well I hope you don’t need studies to tell you what is going to happen: you are clearly just going to gain weight. Not working out or getting exercise and continuously eating is going to make you gain not just a few but a lot of weight if you do nothing to work it off. You may wonder what we even started talking about since I have started talking about food, but the main subject that we have started this discussion on is televisions. Many of us think that they are harmless- WRONG, they may not “physically” harm us, but think of what they do to us. They almost get us ‘hypnotized’ into watching whatever show is on. You may still think ‘What’s wrong with the fact that we like to watch TV?’ Well, the answer is that TV all in all is not bad to watch, it is just when people start getting almost pulled into the television and they forget about the other things in life that are most of the time more important than sitting yourself down in the front of your TV and staying there for the night to see what shows are on.
Now some of you may say that you don’t believe this matter or that you do, but you can’t believe that it really has changed that drastically through the past years. If you do not believe me maybe you will believe some statistics and facts that I have found about this subject. To just start out with the subject, studies show that the United States is ranked number one (tied with the UK) in the world that watches the most television, with about 28 hours on average per week each American watches. Some of you may not watch that much television like most children our age; However we don’t watch this much because of after school actives or clubs. But on average almost the entire country, that is about how much television is watched per American per week. That is just one study that was taken, another study shows the reading v.s. watching TV ratio; This study had shown that about 67% of Americans choose watching TV over reading. That is another thing that is just showing what is happening in our society, even reading is chosen second over television. Now you may not want to just be loaded with facts, but there were many studies taken on television and more and more people are watching, also one of the studies found that the reason they continue to get more and more views is right now, about 99% of all households in the United States own 1 or more television sets and about 66% of Americans own about 3 TV sets in their house at the moment. Even TV sizes have gotten larger through the years—let’s start with 2002. In 2002 the average TV was about 34 inches large, that number stayed the same until approximately the year 2004 (which was also one of the biggest jumps) when the average size TV got to about 46 inches in size. The next year, it went down to 42 inches then stayed the same for one more year, then jumped back up to 46 and now has stayed at that number until about now. Although, there is something that they do predict—studies show that eventually the average size television will be all the way up to 60 inches in size.
With all of these facts that I have shown you and just told you about, I hope that you see where our future is going if we do not start to stop the problem. If we don’t do anything about this, what do you think will happen through the next decade? We will kind of ignore life, almost like it will be our second priority instead of our first. Do you want that to happen to you, or your children, or their children? I didn’t think so, so we need to put a stop to this. If there are any moms or dads out there make your children play outside more, let them enjoy life how we have it now. If they don’t want to go out tell them that you will go and play a game with them for a little while-something to make them want to go and play instead of sit in the front room from the time they get home from school until the time that they go to bed at night.
The novel Fahrenheit 451 has a huge problem of this as well, in this novel people own televisions the sizes of their walls and think of them as their ‘family’ they are so hypnotized into their TV. In this novel, they never stopped the problem which is why everybody was soon getting TV’s in their parlors and watching them 24/7. We shouldn’t let that happen which is what I said before and we do need to try to put a stop to it! Tell everyone you know that they should help this cause and tell them they should try to get out more, and maybe even get more active! Do something so that they aren’t just sitting in the same spot all day long watching nothing but reruns.
I hope that you have liked my speech about what televisions are doing to us and what is happening to our environment. If you would like to see where I have gotten some of this information you could go to…
· http://flowingdata.com/2009/09/23/tv-size-over-the-past-8-years/
· http://www.infoplease.com/entertainment/books/hours-minutes-watching-tv-reading.html
· http://www.csun.edu/science/health/docs/tv&health.html
· http://www.nationmaster.com/graph/med_tel_vie-media-television-viewing
· http://wiki.answers.com/Q/What_percentage_of_Americans_watch_TV_everyday
· http://www.livescience.com/culture/081115-tv-unhappy.html
But thank you again for listening to my speech and I hope that you have learned and enjoyed it!
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