PART II. A. LEXICON · Inglés PAU Castilla-La Mancha Extraordinaria 2025

READING

Young people´s screen time

1. As we can attest from firsthand experience, regular TV viewership has been decreasing as streaming services like Netflix are becoming increasingly popular. The amount of time kids and teens spend watching TV has dropped. In 2013, young people spent an average of 3 hours per day in front of the television screen; today, it's an hour and 12 minutes. So, have youths reduced their screen time? Not really. Studies show rather that they have traded the TV screen for their phone and laptop. Now the average youth watches 97 minutes of YouTube and 95 minutes of TikTok per day.

7. A few years ago, two Oxford researchers captured the media's attention by concluding that screen time was as bad for teen mental health as… potatoes! Their paper even stated that social media had no psychological negative effects. However, most of the evidence points to the contrary. Two Spanish researchers argued that the Oxford study's conclusions were "extremely misleading", after they found that the use of social media was strongly linked to mental health issues, while TV and gaming were only weakly related. Other studies confirmed this and added that the worst effects impacted girls 50% more than boys.

13. It's time to abandon the idea that screen time doesn't matter for mental health. It does. It's just that some screen time matters more than others. Social media seems the most problematic. For practical purposes, that's good news. Parents, policymakers, and teens themselves don't need to consider giving up technology; instead, they can focus on cutting back on social media time. There are other ways teens can stay in touch with friends virtually, like texting, gaming together or meeting on FaceTime or Zoom.

Adapted from the bbc.com/news/education

PART II. LEXICON / PHONETICS (2 POINTS)

A. LEXICON. (1 POINT) (0.25 points for each correct answer) Find a synonym for each of the following words.

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