1 Read the quotation. Then discuss the questions below in pairs or small groups.
‘There are no strangers … only friends you haven’t yet met.’ William Butler Yeats (Irish poet)
1
What do you think the quotation suggests about friendship?
2
Do you agree with this idea? Why? / Why not?
Practice
2 Read the two texts quickly. Then answer the questions.
1
Which text is probably a news story?
2
Which text gives a personal point of view?
3
Which text complains about a common idea?
4
Which text refers to research done in the past?
5
Which text gives examples from real life?
The source does not include a printed solution for this question. Try solving it, then ask the AI tutor to check.
Reading
Text A
A new study into how the Internet is changing the nature of friendship has found that social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace don’t help people make more close friends. Although people (especially young people) using these sites claim to have thousands of ‘friends’, this research suggests that face-to-face contact is usually needed to form genuine relationships.
Many previous studies of friendship have established that the maximum number of people in a standard friendship group is 150, with about five of these regarded as close friends. This new study has found that, in terms of how many people we keep in regular contact with, these figures remain roughly the same for online friends. What’s more, the five closest friends of regular Internet users are likely to be people they have actually met.
‘To form close friendships, we need to be able to trust the other person,’ explains Dr Samuel Holiday, one of the report’s co-authors, ‘and with people that you only know through the Internet, you can’t even be sure they’re who they say they are.’
Reading
Text B
As someone who has made a lot of friends via the Internet, I’m tired of hearing that they’re not ‘real friends’. The argument seems to be that you can never really know someone unless you’ve actually met them. The fact is, though, that meeting someone is no guarantee that they’re who they say they are. I’ve met lots of people whose real character and intentions turned out to be different from those first presented.
In fact, I regard some people I’ve met online as my closest friends. We actually have many interests in common, which is why we got together in the first place. The things I’m interested in are perhaps a bit unusual, and there’s little chance of meeting others with the same interests without the Internet.
Compare this with people I met at school and haven’t seen or contacted for nearly twenty years, or people I know at work. I’m supposed to think of these as ‘real’ friends, and the ones I chat to nearly every day as just ‘Internet friends’. I’m told that these Internet friends are somehow less real, which doesn’t make sense. In my experience, friendships made online are just as real as the ones we happened to make face to face.