BRINGING THE WORLD TOGETHER H you ever used Skype to talk to someone on the other side of the world Maybe you have searched Google for sources to write a school report The internet connects us to people and information from all over the world It is hard to picture a world without Google or Instagram But the internet is a fairly new invention In fact it was only made widely available in the early 1990s Before then the only way to share information was through books computer disks and other forms of hard copy If you wanted to send a note to a friend The internet gives people in many locations access to information from around the world ABD_PROG_INT_FPGS indd
INTERNET USERS AROUND THE WORLD Middle East 3.9 Oceania Australia 0.7 Asia 48.7 North America 8.3 Africa 10 9 Europe 17 Latin America Caribbean 10.5 This chart shows what percentage of total internet users came from each region in March 2018 Why do you think some regions made up a greater percentage of internet users than others you had to write it on a piece of paper It could take days to arrive in the mail Thanks to the internet the world is at our fingertips We can use web pages to teach each other about new topics We can use social media to share pictures of our lives in real-time We can even watch videos on demand
Understanding the Internet The internet is a huge collection of computers They are connected by wires cables radio waves and satellite links They form a network The internet is used to move data from one computer to another Data might include web pages files music and emails One way to think of the internet is to compare it to a system of highways A computer network is made up of many roads linked together Data is like the cars It uses highways to move from one place to another The internet is made up of hundreds of millions of computers around the world Some store large amounts of data They pass the data on as needed These computers are called servers There are different kinds of servers File servers store documents Mail servers store messages Web servers store web pages A computer that pulls data off of the internet is called a client There are many more clients than servers A router is a type of computer that connects other computers to the internet
