Module3 Ge-E6 Reading
Module3 Ge-E6 Reading
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Unit 3: Reading
3.1. Introduction
Hello, learner! How was your journey to the world of sound and the art of waves?
I am sure you enjoyed it and you did pretty well! Listening is a skill you crucially need
to win over life’s hurdles towards success. As early as now, I congratulate you for
successfully finishing the Unit 1!
This time, brace yourself and get ready as we get a round-trip ticket around the
world through the best replacement to travel, READING!
Reading encompasses a variety of skills that can permeate all aspects of life.
Having strong reading abilities can enable you to interpret and find meaning in
everything you read, simply put, reading does the trick! Reading is very important to
get information in the world. Reading can make people to know from nothing to
something. In English, reading is one of English skill besides listening, speaking and
writing. Reading holds the in our life to search information or knowledge from
textbooks, article or magazines written in English. Thus, the students should have
good reading skills to help them in academic studies and to get information in the
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world. According to Apsari (2017), reading is important activity in life which one can
update the knowledge or reading is not only a source of information and a pleasurable
activity but also as a means of consolidating and extending one’ knowledge of the
language. The skill of reading is developed in societies with literary taste, because it
can lead to develop comprehension, enrich vocabulary.
Most of us read in everyday life for different purposes – you are reading this page
now, for a purpose. When you read while studying an academic course, your principal
goal will be to gather information in order to answer an assignment question or gain
further information on a subject for an exam or other type of assessment. However, we
have to read to make sense of the things around us, develop the mind, land on a good
job, and function on today’s society.
There is an old saying, "The pen is mightier than the sword." Ideas written
down have changed the destiny of men and nations for better or worse. Only by
reading can we be armed in this never-ending, life-and-death struggle. The question
is, are you now ready to welcome your ‘destination’ with hope that victory is at hand
because of reading? If yes, join me acquire the skills in reading!
3.2.1 Skimming
All along, you have been applying one skill in reading, and that is, skimming.
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Based from Merriam Webster, skimming is a method of rapidly moving the eyes
over text with the purpose of getting only the main ideas and a general overview of the
content. You skim a text to obtain the gist – the overall sense – of a piece of writing. This can
help you decide whether to read it more slowly and in more detail.
When you use the skimming technique you don’t read the whole text word for
word. You should use as many clues as possible to give you some background information.
There might be pictures or images related to the topic, or an eye-catching title. Let your eyes
skim over the surface of the text and look out for key words while thinking about any clues
you’ve found about the subject.
Mastering the art of skimming effectively requires that you use it as frequently as
possible.
2.2.2 Scanning
Scanning rapidly covers a great deal of material in order to locate a specific fact or
piece of information. It is very useful for finding a specific name, date, statistic, or fact
without reading the entire article.
You scan a text to obtain specific information. For example, to find a particular
number in a telephone directory. In scanning, you must be willing to skip over large
sections of text without reading or understanding them.
Here’s what’s surprising: scanning can be done at 1500 or more words per minute!
As a student, piles of
books are needed to be
read overnight especially
when the ‘hell week’ is on.
What you would probably
feel is to be overwhelmed by
the amount of reading you need to
do. And the thing you wish is to have them all read 2-5 times faster with
better comprehension. Is it even possible? Yes, it is!
Speed reading is one of the best skills you can learn to acquire. Learning to read
faster will enable you to consume more information than ever before. A fater reading
speed will help you save a ton of time. If you’re a student, you’ll find it easier to keep
up with your textbooks and you’ll get better grades.
Your reading speed is measured in words per minute (WPM). To find out your
reading speed, you are simply going to read for one minute and then figure out how
many words were read.
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If your reading speed was somewhere between 150 to 250 words per minute, then
you are reading at average speed. Our goal is simply to move this range higher not
only to improve speed, but also comprehension and retention.
With just a little bit of practice, you can start reading faster in just a few minutes.
You may use these drills to make your first improvement in your reading rate:
1. Use your hand to read faster – Our eyes are naturally attracted to motion. Take
advantage of this and use it to speed up your reading rate.
2. Practice speed drills – You read for a certain period of time, let’s say 10
minutes. You then try to re-read that same material in less time.
3. Read faster with comprehension – After completing the first speed drill, it’s
time to re-test the regular reading speed but you have to make sure that you
allow to get comprehension.
If you want to read faster, you must change the way you currently read.
2.2.4 Paraphrasing
Well, things like this happens to us once or twice in our life, but not totally in the
same situation. However, this is how the importance of paraphrasing looks like.
We make a new different concept out of the original, but with the same meaning.
However, because of paraphrasing, it becomes somehow new or original.
Paraphrasing is not the same as quoting. When you quote, you repeat the
author’s exact words, and you show this by putting them in quotation marks. When
you paraphrase, on the other hand, you use your own words to talk about the
author’s idea, and you don’t use quotation marks. But, no matter whether you’re
quoting or paraphrasing, you always need to cite the source.
Paraphrase this: “Romeo and Juliet is not only the tale of two young, doomed
lovers; it is the story of how youth can be destroyed when the banality of adulthood
is imminent” (Smith 76).
1. Read the original passage several times until you feel you fully understand it.
2. Imagine how you would explain this passage verbally to someone who had not
read it.
We focus on what we look for, just like when we’re waiting in queue, before stacking
an order, we already have disregarded other food on the menu because we chose what we
want.
This is how keyword works.
Keywords are the words that carry specific
information. This technique is finding words
in the text that have a similar meaning to
words in the questions. Key words help you to
locate the place in the text where the answer
lies and to pick out EXACTLY which part of
this group of sentences is the one that you need
for the correct answer.
Usually, the key words are the nouns and verbs, names (places, scientists, people
and more included in the passage), locations (towns, cities, states, countries…), dates and
years, numbers or figures, and capitalized or italicized words/phrases.
The main point of the "keyword technique" is that you have some specific words to
look for in the passage. But remember: Locating the answer is just the first step. The second
step is reading carefully, making sure you understand what you are reading, and
comparing with the question.
A. Potential leaders
B. Open to new ideas
C. Good at teamwork
Read the first question and underline "keywords". These are the words
that you think you will need to search for in the passage. They are the words
that communicate the meaning of the question: normally nouns, verbs and
adjectives.
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The invention of rockets is linked inextricably with the invention of 'black powder'. Most historians of
technology credit the Chinese with its discovery. They base their belief on studies of Chinese writings or on the
notebooks of early Europeans who settled in or made long visits to China to study its history and civilization. It is
probable that, sometime in the tenth century, black powder was first compounded from its basic ingredients of
saltpetre, charcoal and sulphur. But this does not mean that it was immediately used to propel rockets. By the
thirteenth century, powder propelled fire arrows had become rather common. The Chinese relied on this type of
technological development to produce incendiary projectiles of many sorts, explosive grenades and possibly
cannons to repel their enemies. One such weapon was the 'basket of fire' or, as directly translated from Chinese,
the 'arrows like flying leopards'. The 0.7 meter-long arrows, each with a long tube of gunpowder attached near the
point of each arrow, could be fired from a long, octagonal-shaped basket at the same time and had a range of 400
paces. Another weapon was the 'arrow as a flying sabre', which could be fired from crossbows. The rocket, placed
in a similar position to other rocket-propelled arrows, was designed to increase the range. A small iron weight was
attached to the 1.5m bamboo shaft, just below the feathers, to increase the arrow's stability by moving the centre
of gravity to a position below the rocket. At a similar time, the Arabs had developed the 'egg which moves and
burns'. This 'egg' was apparently full of gunpowder and stabilised by a 1.5m tail. It was fired using two rockets
attached to either side of this tail.
It was not until the eighteenth century that Europe became seriously interested in the possibilities of using
the rocket itself as a weapon of war and not just to propel other weapons. Prior to this, rockets were used only in
pyrotechnic displays. The incentive for the more aggressive use of rockets came not from within the European
continent but from far-away India, whose leaders had built up a corps of rocketeers and used rockets successfully
against the British in the late eighteenth century. The Indian rockets used against the British were described by a
British Captain serving in India as ‘an iron envelope about 200 millimetres long and 40 millimetres in diameter with
sharp points at the top and a 3m-long bamboo guiding stick’. In the early nineteenth century the British began to
experiment with incendiary barrage rockets. The British rocket differed from the Indian version in that it was
completely encased in a stout, iron cylinder, terminating in a conical head, measuring one metre in diameter and
having a stick almost five metres long and constructed in such a way that it could be firmly attached to the body of
the rocket. The Americans developed a rocket, complete with its own launcher, to use against the Mexicans in the
mid-nineteenth century. A long cylindrical tube was propped up by two sticks and fastened to the top of the
launcher, thereby allowing the rockets to be inserted and lit from the other end. However, the results were
sometimes not that impressive as the behaviour of the rockets in flight was less than predictable.
(Items 1-4)
You may use any letter more than once. On a yellow paper, answer only.
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1. black powder
2. rocket-propelled arrows for fighting
3. rockets as war weapons
4. the rocket launcher
In 11-13 on a yellow paper (answer only), write True, False or Not given.
11. Marie Curie’s husband was a joint winner of both Marie’s Nobel Prizes.
12. Marie became interested in science when she was a child.
13. Marie was able to attend the Sorbonne because of her sister’s financial contribution .
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Instructions: Read the text and choose the best option in the items found in the next page. On your
yellow paper, ANSWER ONLY.
The general assumption is that older workers are paid more in spite of, rather
than because of, their productivity. That might partly explain why, when employers
are under pressure to cut costs, they persuade a 55-year old to take early retirement.
Take away seniority-based pay scales, and older workers may become a much more
attractive employment proposition. But most employers and many workers are
uncomfortable with the idea of reducing someone’s pay in later life – although manual
workers on piece-rates often earn less as they get older. So retaining the services of
older workers may mean employing them in different ways.
One innovation was devised by IBM Belgium. Faced with the need to cut staff
costs, and having decided to concentrate cuts on 55 to 60-year olds, IBM set up a
separate company called Skill Team, which re-employed any of the early retired who
wanted to go on working up to the age of 60. An employee who joined Skill Team at
the age of 55 on a five-year contract would work for 58% of his time, over the full
period, for 88% of his last IBM salary. The company offered services to IBM, thus
allowing it to retain access to some of the intellectual capital it would otherwise have
lost.
The best way to tempt the old to go on working may be to build on such ‘bridge’
jobs: parttime or temporary employment that creates a more gradual transition from
full-time work to retirement. Studies have found that, in the United States, nearly half
of all men and women who had been in full-time jobs in middle age moved into such
‘bridge’ jobs at the end of their working lives. In general, it is the best-paid and worst-
paid who carry on working. There seem to be two very different types of bridge job-
holder – those who continue working because they have to and those who continue
working because they want to, even though they could afford to retire.
If the job market grows more flexible, the old may find more jobs that suit them.
Often, they will be self-employed. Sometimes, they may start their own businesses: a
study by David Storey of Warwick University found that in Britain 70% of businesses
started by people over 55 survived, compared with an overall national average of only
19%. But whatever pattern of employment they choose, in the coming years the skills
of these ‘grey workers’ will have to be increasingly acknowledged and rewarded.
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Instruction: Read the text and complete the sentences in the items found after reading the text. Write
on a bond paper, ANSWER ONLY.
The science of evolutionary relationships has undergone a major change in recent decades.
It used to be the case that all the features of organisms were important in working out their family
tree. But following the work of German entomologist Willi Hennig, many evolutionary scientists now
believe that the only features which carry any useful information are the evolutionary ‘novelties’
shared between organisms. Mice, lizards and fish, for example, all have backbones – so the feature
‘backbone’ tells us nothing about their evolutionary relationship. But the feature ‘four legs’ is useful
because it’s an evolutionary novelty – a characteristic shared only between the lizard and the mouse.
This would suggest that the lizard and mouse are more closely related to each other than either is
to the fish. This revolutionary approach is called cladistics, and it has been central to the idea that
birds evolved from dinosaurs.
The ‘birds are dinosaurs’ theory was first developed by English palaeontologist Thomas
Huxley (1825–1895). According to some accounts, one evening Huxley went to dinner still thinking
about a mystery dinosaur bone in his lab. He knew he was dealing with the lower leg bone (tibia) of
a meat-eating, two-legged dinosaur belonging to the classification known as theropods, but
attached to the tibia was an unidentified extra bone. On the menu that evening was quail, a small
bird similar to a pheasant, and Huxley noticed the same strange bone, attached to the quail tibia on
his plate. He later realized that it was in fact the bird’s anklebone. More importantly, Huxley
concluded that its forms in both dinosaur and bird skeletons were so similar that they must be
closely related.
Huxley’s idea fell out of favor for fifty years following the 1916 publication of The Origin of
Birds by the Danish doctor Gerhard Heilmann. During this time, Heilmann’s theory was widely
accepted. Heilmann had noted that two-legged, meat-eating dinosaurs lacked collarbones. In later
evolutionary stages these bones fuse together to form the distinctive ‘Y’shaped bone in a bird’s neck,
known as the furcula. Heilmann proposed the notion that such a feature could not be lost and then
re-evolve at a later date, so dinosaurs could not be the ancestors of birds.
Then, in the late 1960s, John Ostrom from Yale University in the US, noted 22 features in
the skeletons of meat-eating dinosaurs that were also found in birds and nowhere else. This reset
the thinking on bird ancestry and once again Huxley’s ideas caught the attention of the scientific
community. Subsequent work has found up to 85 characteristics that tie dinosaurs and birds
together. But what of Heilmann’s missing bones? It turns out that not only did many dinosaurs have
collarbones, these were also fused together into a furcula. Unfortunately for Heilmann, the fossil
evidence was somewhat lacking in his day, and the few furculae that had been found were
misidentified, usually as belly ribs.
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US ornithologist Alan Feduccia and paleontologist Larry Martin are two vocal opponents of
the dinosaur theory. They contend that birds evolved from some unknown reptile at a time long
before dinosaurs. Their reasoning is that flight is most likely to have started from a tree climbing
ancestor, yet all the proposed dinosaurian ancestors were ground-dwellers. But the dino-bird
supporters contend that an unknown dinosaurian bird-ancestor could have been tree-dwelling, or
that birds evolved flight from the ground up by chasing and leaping after insects. Most of Feduccia
and Martin’s case against the ‘birds-are-dinosaurs’ hypothesis is based on differences between birds
and dinosaurs. Supporters of cladistics, however, maintain that differences between organisms do
not matter, as it is the similarities between them that count. Evolution dictates that organisms will
change through time, so it is only the features which persist that carry useful information about their
origins.
Most people on either side of the debate do accept, however, that the ancient winged
creature known as Archaeopteryx is an ancestor of today’s birds. This is in spite of the fact that its
form is distinctly non-bird-like, with a long bony tail, and teeth instead of a beak. The ‘birdsare-
dinosaurs’ supporters contend that, if clearly-preserved feathers had not been found alongside two
of the seven Archaeopteryx specimens, it would probably have been identified as a small dinosaur.
However, Archaeopteryx does have some bird-like features, such as a furcula and bird-like feet, that
suggest that it is too bird-like to be considered a dinosaur.
Over the last few decades several dinosaurs with bird-like features and primitive birds with
dinosaur-like features have been found in several countries, connecting Archaeopteryx back to
dinosaurs, and forwards to modern birds. Sinosauropteryx, excavated from 130-millionyear-old rocks
in northeast China, is one example. It is a dinosaur skeleton surrounded by a halo of fuzz, thought to
be primitive feathers. And a reassessment of other dinosaurs reveals such bird-like features as hollow
bones and a foot with three functional toes, characteristics that appeared over 50 million years before
Archaeopteryx took to the air. And Rahonavis, a primitive bird from Madagascar is more bird-like than
Archaeopteryx, yet retains some distinctive dinosaur features, including a long and vicious claw at the
end of its wing. Over a century since Huxley’s discovery, it seems that cladistics may have finally
settled the ‘dinobird’ debate.
(Questions 18-22)
Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. Answer only.
18. Huxley formulated his theory while studying a dinosaur belonging to a group called ________.
19. Heilmann rejected Huxley’s theory because of the apparent absence of __________ in dinosaurs.
20. Feduccia and Martin believe that the ancestor of today’s birds was a kind of early __________.
21. In cladistics, the __________ between organisms’ characteristics are of major importance.
22. The dangerous ___________ on a primitive bird from Madagascar adds weight to the ‘dino-bird’
argument.
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Instruction: Read the text and complete the summary using the list of words inside the box, below.
On your yellow paper, ANSWER ONLY.
But language is foremost not just because it came first. In its own right it is a tool of
extraordinary sophistication, yet based on an idea of ingenious simplicity: ‘this marvellous
invention of composing out of twenty-five or thirty sounds that infinite variety of expressions
which, whilst having in themselves no likeness to what is in our mind, allow us to disclose to others
its whole secret, and to make known to those who cannot penetrate it all that we imagine, and all
the various stirrings of our soul’. This was how, in 1660, the renowned French grammarians of the
Port-Royal abbey near Versailles distilled the essence of language, and no one since has celebrated
more eloquently the magnitude of its achievement. Even so, there is just one flaw in all these
hymns of praise, for the homage to language’s unique accomplishment conceals a simple yet
critical incongruity. Language is mankind’s greatest invention – except, of course, that it was never
invented. This apparent paradox is at the core of our fascination with language, and it holds many
of its secrets.
(Items 23-25) Write the WORD of the correct answer from the box.
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2.3 References
2.4 Acknowledgment
This notice is to inform all readers that this learning module does not claim as
the originator of these content. The images, tables, figures and information contained
in this module were taken from the references cited above. The sole goal of the
distribution of this module is to increase students' learning opportunities and
flexibility.