figured their newspaper reading at less than fifteen minutes, and seventeen and a half at more.
Very few people have an accurate idea of fifteen minutes, so the figures are not to be taken literally. Moreover, business men, professional people, and college students are most of them liable to a curious little bias against appearing to spend too much time over the newspapers, and perhaps also to a faint suspicion of a desire to be known as rapid readers. All that the figures can justly be taken to mean is that over three quarters of those in the selected groups rate rather low the attention they give to printed news of the outer world.
These time estimates are fairly well confirmed by a test which is less subjective. Scott asked his Chicagoans how many papers they read each day, and was told that
| 14 | percent | read | but | one paper |
| 46 | percent" | read" | two papers | |
| 21 | percent" | read" | three papers | |
| 10 | percent" | read" | four papers | |
| 3 | percent" | read" | five papers | |
| 2 | percent" | read" | six papers | |
| 3 | percent" | read" | all the papers (eight at the time of this inquiry). |
The two- and three-paper readers are sixty-seven percent, which comes fairly close to the seventy-One percent in Scott's group who rate themselves at fifteen minutes a day. The omnivorous readers of from four to eight papers coincide roughly with the twenty-five percent who rated themselves at more than fifteen minutes.
