TV Programs Worth Watching

AECP A1 Essay #1

How many hours a day do you watch TV? Do you never stop switching the remote control to change the channels when you watch it? TV is one of the most popular entertainment media in the world. Many people spend a lot of time watching TV programs; for instance, the average Taiwanese watches TV for more than seventeen hours a week. As a result, it becomes more and more important for us to choose worthy TV programs to watch. There are numerous ways to pick suitable TV programs, but I think that TV programs worth watching depend on the age of the audience, the audience’s purposes, and the opinions of experts.

First of all, TV programs worth watching depend on the age of the audience. Actually, TV programs are always designed for different ages in many countries; thus, many countries have already set up a TV rating system, especially for protecting children. There are four ranks of TV rating systems in the U.S.; for example, TV-G is suitable for all audiences, TV-PG is parental guidance suggested, TV-14 is parental guidance for children under fourteen, and TV-MA is suitable for mature audiences. If the TV rating system is complete, you can easily choose the fit of TV programs to watch.

Second, TV programs worth watching depend on the audience’s purposes. The common types of TV programs are comedy, news, education, sports, game shows, reality shows, talk shows, teenage shows, soap operas, etc. Sometimes, we can learn new knowledge from TV, such as the Discovery Channel, Animal Planet, and National Geographic. If you like to travel, the Lonely Planet will be a good option; moreover, you can pick the news channels, like CNN, BBC, ABC, etc, and realize what is happening around you, in your country, or in the world. I like to watch the sports and dramas, such as ESPN, Friends, Lost, and the Nanny. By watching these TV programs, especially after an exhausting working day, I can feel really relaxed.

Finally, TV programs worth watching depend on the opinions of experts. An investigation that was made by the University of Washington in Seattle in 2006 found 40% of three-month-old babies and 90% of two-year-old children watched TV programs more than one hour a day in the U.S. Furthermore, if children are too young to start watching TV, there will be more serious effects than on older children. Other experts have said if children watch TV more than one hour a day, it will affect their attitude in school; in addition, if they watch TV more than three hours a day, they will have more problems in studying. For these reasons, parents should take care about not only what kind of TV programs their children watch, but also when they start to watch and how long they watch them.

All in all, we have different ways, like the TV rating system, your purposes, and the expert’s opinions to choose TV programs worth watching. At present, there are so many programs on TV, and in fact, you don’t want to watch most of them even once. If you want to spend a lot of time or you just have a little time to watch them, you had better have your own way to select the suitable TV programs for yourself and your children before you turn on the TV set.