The purpose of this part of the book is to help you become more efficient in reading by speeding up the process generally. Most people can learn to cover material much faster than they do now while maintaining a high level of comprehension.
Improvement in reading efficiency has several major benefits. We need reading skills to benefit from the wealth of information that is now available in printed form. Most people get the rough outlines of their daily news from television and radio. However, the printed word still provides the in-depth coverage of topics that really produces well-informed people. Reading is also a great source of entertainment for many people. For students, it is the primary method of studying.
The time you now spend reading can be made much more productive by increasing your reading rate. For some people this will mean that they can obtain more information in the same length of time. For others it will mean that time now devoted to reading can be used in other more interesting and profitable ways.
To determine how fast you are reading, you first have to get some idea of the number of words in a given passage. Then you simply divide the number of words by the number of minutes it takes to read. That will give your rate in words per minute. Reading speed can be calculated by ______.