Adjust the tone of a report section.

You are a consultant working in the education division of a major fi rm. One of your group's clients is a federal government agency trying to increase how much time people spend reading. As part of the argument-and the final report-your client asks you how much time people spend on social networking sites, particularly Facebook.

You find this interesting story online. It's a good starting point, but to present this in a credible way for your client, you'll need to find updated data and, of course, present the data using a more objective tone. Write one or two paragraphs with the most recent data you can find.

Back in July, we reported that Facebook had become the Internet's ultimate time waster, with users spending an average of 4 hours, 39 minutes on it per month, more than any other site on the web.

Since then, however, that number has only gone up. According to numbers from Nielsen Online, users spent an average of 5 hours, 46 minutes on Facebook in the month of August. To put that in perspective, that's triple the amount of time they spent on Google!

In fact, the next closest site in Nielsen's top 10 is Yahoo, which, despite still having huge traffic in time consuming areas like news, sports, and financial data, could only get users to stick around for 3 hours and 14 minutes on average during the month. YouTube, surprisingly, only occupied 1 hour and 17 minutes of the average user's time.