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 textbookbut 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 Englishspeaking 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 halfhour lessons, once a week, the reading
speed can be increased, with no loss of comprehension, to around five hundred
words per minute. |
