By Pat Dawkins Kids today - and you're one of them - can't imagine what life was like before the Internet, before mobile phones, before social media. Today we have 24-hour…

By Pat Dawkins Kids today - and you're one of them - can't imagine what life was like before the Internet, before mobile phones, before social media. Today we have 24-hour entertainment at our fingertips, and there's something for everyone, whether you're into cute cat videos or interactive games. And, of course, it's not just teens. Adults also spend much time surfing the Internet and texting their friends. Though a lot of this technology is barely a decade old, we've already forgotten, it seems, how people used to spend their free time. Today everyone in the family can be on their own digital devices in different parts of the house. Not long ago, if families wanted to be entertained, they would gather around the TV or the radio, all together. Of course, before that our great-grandparents and great great grandparents didn't have radio. Instead they used to read out loud to each other, maybe from a favourite novelist like Dickens or Tolstoy. Musical families used to entertain each other regularly with music, one member of the family playing the piano and everyone singing along. It is important to keep in mind that leisure time is a modern idea. In rural areas people used to work hard from dawn to dusk, and fall into bed right after their evening meal. In the cities most people worked just as many hours in factories. And until the last century children used to work alongside their parents. They didn't have time to just sit around. If they could see us now, always looking at our digital gadgets, they would think we were characters from science fiction! Answer the following questions. 1. What kinds of entertainment are described in the text? 2. Which of them belong to the past and which are still popular? 3. What is your favourite kind of entertainment? 4 What would you do in your leisure time if you lived in the past without the modern gadgets of today?