“Primary school students are abandoning books for computer games as parents struggle to find the right balance between play, homework, reading and electronic entertainment at home.” Ed Balls, the Education Secretary, said yesterday.

Mr. Balls called on parents to cut down on the amount of time they let their children play computer games and urged them to spend at least ten minutes a night reading bedtime stories.

He added that a recent consultation by his department had found a huge groundswell of concern among parents about how best to regulate their children’s computer play.

“Across the country we should be getting our kinds to play computer games a bit less and to read a bit more, he said.

His comments followed the publication of a major international comparison of reading among 10-year-old which showed that England had fallen from third to fifteenth position in the past five years. Scotland fell from fourteenth to twenty-first place in the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study, run by Boston College in Massachusetts. Russian children came top in the study.

The literacy report England, produced for the Government by the National Foundation for Education; Research(NFER),found that 22 percent of English children spent five hours or more playing computer or video games on a normal school day, with 37 percent spending more than three hours. This was exceeded only by the US and seven other countries.

The report also found a clear association between the number of looks at home and reading attainment. The 23 percent of children with 200 or more books at home had significantly higher reading scores than the 10 percent with ten or fewer books.

(1) What does the passage mainly tell us?
A. Playing computer games too much can greatly affect children’s learning grades B. Parents are urged to make children pay computer games less and read more C. Ten-year-old children in different countries spend different amount of time on reading. D. It is necessary for children today to find a balance between playing and learning.
(2) According to the passage, _____ spend the most time on reading.
A. the Russian children B. the American children C. the English children D. the Scottish children
(3) What can we learn from the last paragraph?
A. How children perform at reading tests is mainly determined by the number of books they have at home. B. Children should keep at least ten books at home in order to get good reading scores. C. The number of books children have at home is obviously related to their reading tests D. Only the children who have more than 200 books at home can perform well at reading tests.
(4) It can informed from the passage that

   

A. busy parents today are to blame for causing reduced reading time for their children B. parents haven’t found a proper way to regulate their children’s computer play C. children in developed countries show less interest in reading. D. all the parents spend less than 10 minutes reading bedtime stories to their children.