At home and in cafes, China is waking up and smelling the coffee.

From the proliferating coffee shops in the big cities to the coffee machines slowly infiltrating households, the home of tea is rapidly giving way to java, mocha, latte and the like.

"Currently the average coffee consumption in China stands at a mere three cups per person per year, while that figure rises to 240 cups for the world's average," says Ji Ming, chief of the Beijing Coffee Industry Association. "Therefore, there's a lot of growth potential in China's coffee market."

Currently, Seattle-based Starbucks operates more than 650 stores across 51 Chinese cities and takes the lion's share in the market of specialty coffee shops - more than half in terms of revenue, according to a Euromonitor research report in 2011 - and it plans to increase the number to 1,500 stores, across more than 70 cities and triple the number of employees to 30,000 by 2015.

"We have an extremely ambitious development plan in China," says Belinda Wong, president of Starbucks China. "China has been designated as our second home market outside of the United States. We believe China will become our largest market outside of the US by 2014."

沪江英语快讯：对多数中国消费者而言，咖啡是一个西方概念，而喝咖啡则被视为有修养的表现。而现在越来越多的职场人选择在家喝一两杯咖啡开始一天的生活，咖啡店正逐渐成为都市小青年和城市富人日常生活的一部分。因此，很多外商瞄准中国市场，想来中国将很快超越日本和德国，成为仅次于美国的世界第二大咖啡消费国。

知识扩展：

1.espresso：意式浓缩咖啡
2.cappuccino：卡布奇诺
3.latte：拿铁
：美式咖啡
5.mocha：摩卡咖啡
6.macchiato：玛奇朵

延伸阅读：

谁是职场咖啡狂人：科学家公关教育者名列前三

咖啡爱好者的福音：喝咖啡的7大健康益处