早稲田商2017 II

II

The promise of speed reading ―to absorb text several times faster than normal, without any significant loss of comprehension ― can indeed seem too good to be true. Nonetheless, it has long been an aspiration for many readers, as well as the entrepreneurs seeking to serve them. And as the production rate for new reading matter has increased, and people read on a growing array of devices, the lure of speed reading has only grown stronger.

The first popular speed-reading course was based on the idea that reading was slow because it was ( A ). The course "focused on teaching people to make fewer back-and-forth eye movements across the page, taking in more information with each glance. Unfortunately, the scientific consensus suggests that such enterprises should be viewed with suspicion. In a recent study, we reviewed past research on reading and concluded that it's extremely unlikely you can greatly improve your reading speed without missing out on a lot of meaning.

Certainly, readers are capable of rapidly scanning a text to find a specific word or piece of information, or to pick up a general idea of what the text is about. But this is skimming, not reading.

We can definitely skim, and it may be that speed-reading systems help people skim better. Some speed- reading systems, ( B ), instruct people to focus on the beginnings of paragraphs and chapters. This is probably a good skimming strategy.

But speed reading? Techniques that aim to guide eye movements so that we can take in more information from each glance seem doomed to fail. There is only a small area in the retina for which our visual acuity is very high. Our eyes are seriously limited in their precision outside of that. This means that we can take in only a word or so at a glance, as well as a little bit about the words on either side.

A deeper problem, however, is that the big bottleneck in reading isn't perception (seeing the words) but language processing (assembling strings of words into meanings). Have you ever tried listening to an audio recording with the speaking rate dialed way up? Doubling the speed, in our experience, leaves individual words perfectly identifiable ― but makes it just about impossible to follow the meaning. The same phenomenon occurs with written text.

As in all forms of human behavior, there is a trade-off, in reading, ( C ) speed and accuracy. You can learn to skim strategically so that you spend more time looking where the more important words are likely to be, and if the words are presented in a stream you may be able to learn which words to focus on and which to ignore. However, that does not mean that you can somehow magically read parts of a page that you don't look at, or process all the words in a superfast sequence. Reading is about language ( D ), not visual ability. If you want to improve your reading speed, your best bet ―as old-fashioned as it sounds ―is to read a variety of written material and expand your vocabulary.

The promise of speed reading ―to absorb text several times faster than normal, without any significant loss of comprehension ― can indeed seem too good to be true. Nonetheless, it has long been an aspiration for many readers, as well as the entrepreneurs seeking to serve them. And as the production rate for new reading matter has increased, and people read on a growing array of devices, the lure of speed reading has only grown stronger.

The first popular speed-reading course was based on the idea that reading was slow because it was ( A ). The course "focused on teaching people to make fewer back-and-forth eye movements across the page, taking in more information with each glance. Unfortunately, the scientific consensus suggests that such enterprises should be viewed with suspicion. In a recent study, we reviewed past research on reading and concluded that it's extremely unlikely you can greatly improve your reading speed without missing out on a lot of meaning.

Certainly, readers are capable of rapidly scanning a text to find a specific word or piece of information, or to pick up a general idea of what the text is about. But this is skimming, not reading.

We can definitely skim, and it may be that speed-reading systems help people skim better. Some speed- reading systems, ( B ), instruct people to focus on the beginnings of paragraphs and chapters. This is probably a good skimming strategy.

But speed reading? Techniques that aim to guide eye movements so that we can take in more information from each glance seem doomed to fail. There is only a small area in the retina for which our visual acuity is very high. Our eyes are seriously limited in their precision outside of that. This means that we can take in only a word or so at a glance, as well as a little bit about the words on either side.

A deeper problem, however, is that the big bottleneck in reading isn't perception (seeing the words) but language processing (assembling strings of words into meanings). Have you ever tried listening to an audio recording with the speaking rate dialed way up? Doubling the speed, in our experience, leaves individual words perfectly identifiable ― but makes it just about impossible to follow the meaning. The same phenomenon occurs with written text.

As in all forms of human behavior, there is a trade-off, in reading, ( C ) speed and accuracy. You can learn to skim strategically so that you spend more time looking where the more important words are likely to be, and if the words are presented in a stream you may be able to learn which words to focus on and which to ignore. However, that does not mean that you can somehow magically read parts of a page that you don't look at, or process all the words in a superfast sequence. Reading is about language ( D ), not visual ability. If you want to improve your reading speed, your best bet ―as old-fashioned as it sounds ―is to read a variety of written material and expand your vocabulary.

1. Speed reading means a very fast reading of texts in which an approximate understanding is achieved.

2. The necessity of speed reading has become greater because publishing companies have grown bigger and more diversified.

3. Past research on reading suggests that trying to read fast without failing to grasp essential meanings does not produce significant results.

4. The structure of an eye makes it relatively easy to take in a sequence of words if we are absorbed in them.

5. In order to read a text fast and understand it, we have to adopt conventional practices of reading a lot and building a richer vocabulary.