Anyone writing a letter to the New York Times has one chance in twenty-one of having the letter published. Letter writers to the Washington Post do significantly better one letter out of eight finds its way into print.

The average person in America spends fifty-two minutes each day reading the newspaper. This means that in a seventy year lifetime (subtracting the first fifteen years as nonnewspaper reading time), the typical person spends a little less than two years, about 687 days of his or her life reading the paper.

In every hour that one listens to the radio in America, one hears approximately 11,000 spoken words.

It is estimated that 4 million "junk" telephone calls, phone solicitations by persons or programmed machines, are made every day in America.

According to the General Telephone Company of Pennsylvania, the typical American spends an average of 8,760 hours of his or her life speaking on the telephone every year.

According to the American Telephone and Telegraph Company, there are 24.5 telephone calls made for every 100 people in the entire world.

There are more telephones than people in Washington. D.C.

In 1948 Milton Berle's budget for the "Texaco Star Theater," the most popular one-hour show on television, was $15,000 for the entire hour. Today, this is far less than the cost of a one-minute television commercial.

According to the Television Code of Decency, a beer advertisement can never show a person actually drinking beer. Next time you see such an advertisement on television, notice that while the beer itself is prominently displayed, the subject always stops short of drinking it.

On June 1, 1946, there were only 10,000 television sets in the United States. Five years later, there were 12 million.

According to the Federal Trade Commission, there are 20,000 television commercials made each year that are aimed exclusively at children. Of these, 7,000 are for sugared breakfast cereals.

In the 70's more people with an income below $3,000 a year owned television sets in the United States than those with an income above $10,000.

“Hello” is used very often in English these days, but use of the word is relatively new. It wasn’t used until the late 1820s, and only became popular by the 1860s.