8．From the
passage it can be learnt that the closing ceremony is probably .
A．a sad occasion because all the
exciting competitions are over
B．a happy occasion because the
athletes can make new friends
C．a sad and a happy occasion at the
same time
D．neither sad nor happy because it
will happen again in four years’time
C
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 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 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.