Faster Effective
Reading
A higher reading rate, with no loss of
comprehension, will help you in other subjects as well as in English, and the
general principles apply to any language. Naturally, you will not read every
book at the same speed. You would expect to read a newspaper, for example, much
more rapidly than a physics or economics textbook-but you can raise your average
reading speed over the whole range of materials you wish to cover so that
the percentage (百分比) gained will be the same whatever kind of reading you are
concerned with.
The reading passages which follow are all of an
average level of difficulty for your stage of instruction. They are all
about five hundred words long. They are about topics of general interest which
do not require a great deal of specialized knowledge. Thus they fall between the
kind of reading you might find in your textbooks and the much less demanding
kind you will find in a newspaper or light novel. If you read this kind of
English, with understanding at, say, four hundred words per minute, you might
drop to two hundred or two hundred and fifty.
Perhaps you would
like to know what reading speeds are common among native English-speaking
university students and how those speeds can be improved. Tests in Minnesota, U.
S. A, for example, have shown that students without special training can read
English of average difficulty, for example, Tolstoy’s War and Peace in
translation, at speeds of between 240 and 250 words per minute with about
seventy percent comprehension. Students in Minnesota claim that after twelve
half-hour lessons, one a week, the reading speed can be increased, with no loss
of comprehension, to around five hundred words per
minute. |
