(Video: How to Take an Exam on Reading Comprehension with Time Limit)
Statistic from a reading test conducted by Staples shows that college students can read about 450 words per minute and be able to understand the idea being communicated by the text they are reading.
Being able to read that much words per minute sounds fairly substantial, but in most case, it’s not. This is especially true if you’re a student on a time crunch studying for multiple finals or taking a timed-cumulative exam that both require in-depth reading comprehension.
You’re probably don’t need to be told that by increasing the speed of your reading, thus shortening the time needed to finish a text, could potentially lower your comprehension of the text. Most people already think that.
In most instances, you don’t need to sacrifice the understanding of the text to save on a few seconds on reading, but likewise reading like a turtle doesn’t increase necessarily comprehension either. The key is know what to look for and to know enough.
The skill of skimming, and therefore lessening the amount of time you spend reading, is useful during reading comprehension examinations.
- Normally, during these examinations, you are given a short story or short essay to read. After which, you are expected to answer a series of questions about the given text. Usually, there is more than one text and there are multiple questions after each text. These examinations are, more often than not, timed, and measure your ability to comprehend the article or text with the least amount of time.
It is always a good idea to skim the text, instead of reading slowly, to be able to accurately answer as many questions with the limited time given. Skimming is a way of speed reading wherein the reader does not read each and every word but only skips to the parts which he may determine as important.
How do you determine when a word or phrase is important or not during a reading comprehension examination?
Simple, read the questions before the given text.
Once you have read the questions, at a regular pace, you will be able to narrow down the text to what should be read, what may or may not be read, and what you do not need to read at all.
Most reading comprehension exams/tests are composed of multiple-choice questions and essay-type questions.
The part of the text that you should read are those that answers a direct question, for example: who is the writer speaking to, what is the article about, what happens at the end.
The answers are easily found in the text and do not need any time-wasting analysis to be understood.
The text that may or may not be read usually answers more complex questions, for example: what did the author mean when he referred to happiness, what is the symbolism used for life, what is the general theme of the essay.
These questions require reading and comprehension. After your eyes have lingered or drifted over the words or phrases necessary to answer a particular question, you must then use some level of comprehension reasoning to analyze the words and facts that you have read.
Besides that, the majority of texts you don’t even need to look at in answering the given questions. They are just there to provide a reading experience. They are what makes the text more palatable and, for some, more artistic or creative in nature.
All of this is mostly correlates to your test-taking skills, yet the important thing is to always be better prepared for any exam. You can do so by learning of how to study for exams because being the best test taker in the world is irrelevant when comes to knowing how to answer the question.
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