Brazilian Internet users earned three times as much as average citizens in 2005, according to a study released on Friday.

The study, conducted by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE) as part of the National Household Sample Survey, was sampled from among the country's population aged above 10, which amounted to 152.7 million at the time of the survey.

The study showed 21 percent of the respondents in the survey used Internet in 2005 and their average monthly income reached 1,000 reis (485 U.S. dollars), while the average Brazilian studied in the survey earned 333 reis (161 U.S. dollars) per month.

The income gap was believed to have links with different educational levels of the two groups, the study said.

The average Brazilian went to school for 5.6 years, while the ones belonging to the Internet club did it for 10.7 years. Only 2.5 percent of the citizens with less than four years of formal education used the Internet.

Half of the Brazilian Internet users said they surf the web at home, while 39.7 percent replied they did it at work.

The study also showed that the average age of Internet users was around 28, and 22 percent of the country's male population used Internet while a slightly lower percentage (20.1 percent) of Brazilian women had access to the web.

More than half of the country's Internet users live in the south and Southeast, and the Federal District of Brasilia has the highest percentage of Internet users, with 41.1 percent of the local population used the Web in 2005.

Source: Xinhua