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Fast Food

A: Welcome back to Listeners Garden. I'm LPC.

B: And I'm DS. China is a paradise for gourmands. It has a great variety of regional cuisine as well as wide-ranging exotic foods from all over the world.

A: Yes, you can find all kinds of Chinese and foreign restaurants in China. With ever changing lifestyles, more and more people are becoming busier at work, so they are spending less time cooking food at home.

B: People are living in a much faster society now. They are attaching greater value to time, efficiency and convenience, so many people are choosing to dine out to relieve the hassle of cooking for themselves. The rise of the fast food industry is playing a great part in this change of life style.

A: The Chinese fast food market has been seeing an upsurge in business. Online surveys show that most office workers have fast food for their lunch and even supper on weekdays. And many community residents also choose fast food quite often because of its convenience and comparatively low price.

B: Although China has one of the world's longest culinary traditions, the fast food industry began to grow only in 1987, when KFC entered the Chinese market and established its first location in Beijing.

A: The entry of KFC brought the idea of "fast food" to the Chinese people. Its booming business prompted the chain to open more branches around the country.

B: KFC's success in China provided a big incentive to other global fast food chains. McDonald's and Pizza Hut followed suit in 1990, and later, more leading foreign fast food enterprises came to grab a share of the pie.

A: Foreign fast food restaurants quickly won over local customers, especially the younger generation, because of their attractive décor, relaxed dining atmosphere and exotic food as well as quick, efficient service.

B: As more and more Western fast food chains establish their presence in China and expand their outlets nationwide, they have had a great impact on the traditional Chinese catering industry. Many Chinese entrepreneurs ambitiously sought to realize the development of homegrown fast food chains to compete with the Western newcomers. Some of them have succeeded, but some have ended in failure.