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
The World Wide Web The internet and the World Wide Web called the Web are closely related But they are actually two different things The Web is an application that runs on the internet It is the collection of public web pages found online Web pages are made of text images and hyperlinks A collection of web pages that are linked together on the same server is called a website The Web is the most common way for people to access data on the internet Web pages are written in computer code Browsers such as Internet Explorer and Google Chrome translate the code SCREEN TIME There are nearly 4 billion people on the internet around the world Approximately 87 percent of Americans use the internet Each day US adults spend nearly 11 hours looking at a screen Facebook is the top social media site with nearly 2 billion users Most users spend approximately 50 minutes on it each day Some doctors are worried so much screen time can lead to obesity poor sleep and poor performance in school
into text and graphics People use browsers to view web pages Users can visit different websites with a browser like they can watch different channels on a television Many scientists engineers and researchers built the internet as we know it today Thanks to them the world’s information is just a few clicks away for many people This invention changed the world PERSPECTIVES AMERICANS WITHOUT INTERNET Thirteen percent of Americans are not online Of these approximately one-third say they have no interest in the internet at all Another one-third find the internet hard to use Some think they are too old to learn a new technology One-fifth cannot afford a computer or internet fees Black and Hispanic people are more likely than white people to rely on free public internet access Those with low incomes or less education are also less likely to have internet access The rest have several other reasons they do not use the internet
