Americans’ Interest on Australia

For book discussion of our Readers’ Advisory class in this week, we discussed about four genres: two books of travel, and two books of adventure.

One of the books, which we all had to read for travel genre, was ‘In A Sunburned Country,’ by Bill Bryson. This is very good book and I will say this is more than ‘travel.’ The book is written thickly and readers can get bunch of information from only one sentence or from one paragraph. This is a book about Australia and if you read this book, you may smell of the natural plants of Australia, you may see the specific animals of Australia (such as Kangaroo), you may know part of Australia’s history and you may have the chance to explore the geography and people of this huge island, which is the sixth largest country in the world.

I am going to talk here is not about that book, but about one of the categories in that book, which is the ‘measurement.’ I like it. Bill Bryson made a research on “Americans’ interest in Australia” before he visited the country. He measured American people’s interest in certain country with - how many news and articles were expressed within one year in New York Times about that country. In the year he did research (I think in 1999), there were only 20 news and articles about Australia in NY Times. Bill remarked that - interest of Americans on Australia was between banana and ice cream.

Then, I curiously made a research yesterday, ‘how about now?’ ‘How about Americans’ interest on Australia nowadays? I explored a little bit about it in the website of NY Times. I made a research on all countries, which have beginning letter of A, from Afghanistan to Austria. There are 10 countries with the beginning letter A and the date limit that I set up was from January 1st 2007 to April 9th 2008. Guess where is the (Americans’ interest) rank on Australia?

According to the numbers those occurred at NY Times webpage, the Australia has ranked the second, after Afghanistan. You can see the ranks as below with numbers:
(1) Afghanistan – 2281
(2) Australia – 1504
(3) Argentina – 621
(4) Austria – 511
(5) Algeria – 176
(6) Angola – 110
(7) Albania – 92
(8) Armenia – 75
(9) Andorra – 17
(10) Antigua and Burbuda – 0

Then, I also did a little bit further research, which is about Americans’ interest on ‘banana’ and ‘ice cream.’ Ice cream marked the number of 805 (between Argentina and Australia), while banana’s number was 404 (some less than Austria), which means – nowadays, Americans’ interest on Australia is much more than both of ice cream and banana.

Have Fun!


Picture: http://www.immigration2australia.com/australia_kangaroo.jpg