Comparing word lengths of newspapers and magazines.

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MATHEMATICS COURSEWORK

Suresh is comparing magazines and newspapers. He chooses a passage from one newspaper and one magazine. They each contain 100 words and he counts the length of all the words. Suresh then says that the magazine has the shortest words.

Write a hypothesis about the length of words in newspapers and magazines.

Design and carry out an investigation to test your hypothesis.

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Aim

My aim is to find out whether the words in magazines are shorter or longer than the words in newspapers by comparing the two. I will sample two articles from both a newspaper and a magazine, analysing the length of words, to collect data for graphical representation.

Hypothesis

My hypothesis is that the length of words in articles for magazines will be shorter than the length of words printed in newspapers. I have decided not to use a tabloid newspaper but a broadsheet newspaper because tabloid papers usually contain similar articles to magazines and the data will be affected. The Broadsheet newspaper that I have decided to use is "The Times" and the magazine I am going to use is called "New!"

The reason for this hypothesis is that newspapers are fundamentally targeted for the mainstream working public, who usually are of adult age. Therefore the language used in newspaper texts generally involves a wider, more comprehensive and technical use of the English language to report more efficiently the variety of news available. Articles in newspapers are of serious context, concise and quite descriptive.
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Magazines are published and targeted for all ages, because there is such a wide range of topic interest. Usually magazine articles focus on light-reading topics such as entertainment, high-street fashion, celebrity gossip, and health and beauty issues. Articles such as these are written in an easy language - i.e. shorter words, for the readers to quickly understand accompanied by many colourful illustrations.

Broadsheets

Magazine

Theme

Factual / less gossip

Celebrity gossip / factual

Cost

20p - £1.00

60p - £5.00

Type of adverts included

Jobs, Cars, Property sales, ...

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