A person worth nowadays seems to be judged according to social status and material possessions. Old fashioned values such as honour, kindness and trust no longer seem important. To what extent do you agree or disagree?

The data provide information on the percentage of households owning three kinds of electrical appliances, namely washing machines,

refrigerators

and vacuum cleaners, and how much time they spent on carrying out the household chores in one country from 1920 to 2019. Overall, ownership of all these pieces of equipment increased;

conversely

, the total time allocated for housework decreased significantly. The most salient feature of

this

data is that

refrigerators

became ubiquitous dramatically. In the

first

year of the given time frame, washing machines were the most common of the three, with two-fifths of households having them. the only downward trend can be seen in

this

category from 1960 to 1980, with a 5% decrease. At

this

point, it had gone back up to the same figure of 70% for 1996 by 2000 and remained relatively stable until 2019.

By contrast

, there were not any

refrigerators

in homes in 1920. The figures for

refrigerators

had,

however

, risen to 50% by 1940, and

then

continued to grow considerably to

such

an extent that took the lead from

then

on, with all households possessing them from 1980 onwards. Moving on to vacuum cleaners, the figures followed a similar pattern to those of

refrigerators

, though it increased steadily. In the early decades of the twenty-

first

century,

this

had the joint-highest percentage of ownership along with

refrigerators

(100%). In terms of the number of hours spent on household chores, there had been a decrease of 80% (10 hours a week) by the end of the period in question, which contrasts sharply with the number of 50 hours in 1920.