Reading
1. PW. Read and comment on the text

Countries have a lot in common. For example, a night out in Tokyo is much the same as a night out in Milan. Whether you live in Korea or Canada, Italy or Ireland, a typical night out is spent eating burgers, seeing American films or listening to English-language music in clubs and bars. However, there are some individual differences: the ballet is still particularly popular amongst Russians, while more Japanese favour an evening of Karaoke, but American culture is everywhere.

Differences in the social behaviour are also disappearing. A couple should split the bill when they go out together. For most young people these are the biggest differences between their own generation and their parents.

However, the vast majority of the young people interviewed say that parents are still stricter with daughters than sons about places where they go and whom they go with. Overall, only 10 per cent think that parents treat their sons and daughters equally, and almost no one thinks parents are stricter with their sons. In most countries, it was also agreed that such rules tend to be stricter outside the big cities. Important national differences appear. However, when it comes to time-keeping in the Far East and in Eastern Europe a night out starts and finishes much earlier: seven o’clock is the average time given for meeting up with friends. For many Southern Europeans and South Americans, an evening out doesn’t even start until ten or eleven o’clock, when many of their Korean and Japanese counterparts are safely at home in bed!

Parents’ rules reflect this. Most Japanese parents expect their teenagers to be at home by ten o’clock or even earlier, whereas in Europe it is more likely to be at home by eleven or twelve o’clock. It is apparently quite normal for a 15 and 16- years-old youngster* to stay out late at night. Perhaps this is because their parents have less to worry about.

*youngster- a child, a young person