电视广告铺天盖地。那么这些广告对整天坐在电视机前的孩子们会有怎样的影响呢？

                             Ads’ Influence on Kids

   Time: 4.5 minutes   Difficulty: ★★★★

   Our televisions are inundated with flood of adverts and children could hardly escape the influence.

Nowadays youngsters are bombarded with adverts and media images. By the age of seven, children could recognize 400 brands and watch around 10,000 adverts every year.

TV commercials encourage youngsters to buy luxury things, fashionable clothes, brand items, some of which their parents could not afford. If denied, they would keep pestering and arguing until parents give in, which will definitely indulge the kids and sour the parent-child relationship. There are fears that they would be leading to commercialization of childhood. The sexualisation of girls result in problems, like eating disorders and the surge in under-age binge drinking. Some of the girls, as young as seven, are worried about their weight and coming out to become overweight. They think alcohol is the way to be really cool.

 Critics say efforts have already been done for decades to put things right. Who knows what adverts children would be watching in another ten years.

Help: inundate vt. 淹没    luxury n. 奢侈

（河南 崔兴亚 选编）

责任编辑:yingyubao