阅读理解。
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) grained 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 four hundred words per minute, you might skim (浏览) through a newspaper at perhaps
650~700, while with a difficult textbook 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, once a week, the reading speed can be
increased, with no loss of comprehension, to around five hundred words per minute.
1. Where do you think the passage is taken from? [ ]
A. A school newspaper run by students.
B. The introduction to a book on fast reading.
C. The introduction to an English textbook.
D. A local newspaper for young people.
2. According to the passage, how fast can you expect to read after you have attended twelve half-hour lessons
in the University of Minnesota? [ ]
A. You can double your reading speed.
B. You can increase your reading speed by four times.
C. You can increase your reading speed by three times.
D. No real increase in reading speed can be achieved.
3. The average speed of untrained native speakers in the University of Minnesota is _____. [ ]
A. about sixty words per minute
B. about two hundred and forty-five words per minute
C. about five hundred words per minute
D. about three hundred words per minute
4. According to the passage, the purpose of effective reading with higher speed is most likely to help you
_____.[ ]
A. not only in your language study but also in other subjects
B. improve your understanding of an economics textbook
C. choose the suitable material to read
D. only in your reading of a physics textbook
