Before you read
1. Do you think reading is important?
2. Do you prefer reading to watching TV?
3. How much time do you spend on reading?
4. Are there real book lovers among your friends?
5. What do you think people gain from reading literature?
Read the text and answer the questions.
A word about books. Man invented a number of means to cover distance – cars,
planes, radio, TV, computers, spaceships, etc. But up till now there has been only one
way to cover time – books. Reading is real fun, isn’t it? It may be a fantastic journey into
the past or the future, a true love story or a serious novel to challenge your thoughts, a
detective or something funny if you like humour.
Until recently you could see a lot of people, old and young, reading in many different
places, in a park or on a bus, in a plane or on a beach. It might be a magazine or a
newspaper, a volume of poems or a lengthy novel. All kinds of reading stuff. But now
it’s a rare event. Alternative sources of information like TV or computers seen more
attractive to most people. But books give us something different from them. It’s a
dialogue with somebody who can tell you a lot about life, people, their relations, and
about this fast changing world. Books help you understand yourself better. They develop
imagination, love for word and expression and awaken a wish in you to create something.
It is next to impossible1 to imagine life without books.
The way we read. We read in many different ways, and at different speeds
depending on the aim of reading. We sometimes look through the book to see what it is
about. We may just want to get the general idea from a newspaper article, a report, or a
book in a bookshop. This type of reading is called skimming reading.
Quick reading is also practised when we want to get a particular piece of information,
such as a date or a telephone number. This is called scanning. We scan timetables,
telephone directories, dictionaries and web pages.
But if we want to get the detailed information we read slowly and carefully. This is
called intensive1 reading, or study reading. In the latter case we check the meaning not
to misunderstand something. We consult dictionaries if necessary. We take notes to
remember something important, such as a mathematical quotation2.
Reading fi ction, a novel or a favourite poem, is also intensive reading, it needs
training and special skills to understand the entire content, the beauty of the expression.
You get involved in the story. It makes you laugh your head off or cry your heart out. It
develops your personality.
Comprehension
Answer the questions.
1. What are the alternative sources of information?
2. Are books different from other sources of information.?
3. When do we use a.scanning, b.skimming, c.intensive reading?