Chapter 2:
General Reading Skills

Skimming

Skimming is essentially speed reading with a low level of comprehension. Use the structured nature of the humanities, social science, and natural science passages to help you vary your reading speed. For example, the first and last sentences of each paragraph are typically the most important, and the introduction and conclusion of each passage typically give the broadest framework for the content of the passage as a whole. Therefore, you can gather a great deal of information by focusing on comprehending these parts of the passage.

You might be surprised by how much you can understand from looking only at these portions of the text. When a passage includes a list such as wheat, barley, and kale, you can breeze through these details and simply try to commit to memory the location of the list within the structure of the passage in case you are asked about this information later.

Look at these key sentences from a passage adapted from Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature by Janine M. Benyus (©1997 by Janine M. Benyus). Compare your understanding of the main ideas of the passage based on these sentences alone to your comprehension after reading the full passage, which has these sentences underlined for you.

SOCIAL SCIENCE: This passage is adapted from Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature by Janine M. Benyus (©1997 by Janine M. Benyus).

• Introduction First Sentence

  If anybody’s growing biomass, it’s us. To keep our system from collapsing on itself, industrial ecologists are attempting to build a “no-waste economy.”

• Introduction Last Sentence

  The first examples of this no-waste economy are collections of companies clustered in an ecopark and connected in a food chain, with each firm’s waste going next door to become the other firm’s raw material or fuel.

• Topic Sentence of the First Body Paragraph

  In Denmark, the town of Kalundborg has the world’s most elaborate prototype of an ecopark.

• Topic Sentence of the Second Body Paragraph

  Waste steam from the power company is used by Novo Nordisk to heat the fermentation tanks that produce insulin and enzymes.

• Topic Sentence of the Third Body Paragraph

  Meanwhile, back at the Statoil Refinery, waste gas that used to go up a smokestack is now purified.

• Topic Sentence of the Fourth Body Paragraph

  Although Kalundborg is a cozy co-location, industries need not be geographically close to operate in a food web as long as they are connected by a mutual desire to use waste.

• Topic Sentence of the Fifth Body Paragraph

  So far, we’ve talked about recycling within a circle of companies.

• Topic Sentence of the Sixth Body Paragraph

  Traditionally, manufacturers haven’t had to worry about what happens to a product after it leaves their gates.

• First Sentence of the Conclusion

  When the onus shifts in this way, it’s suddenly in the company’s best interest to design a product that will either last a long time or come apart easily for recycling or reuse.

• Last Sentence of the Conclusion

  Today’s bags, which have nine thin layers made of seven different materials, will no doubt be replaced by one material that can preserve freshness and can easily be remade into a new bag.

• Synthesis of the Main Idea Based on the Previous Information

  Companies are beginning to take responsibility for using materials in a sustainable way that considers the life cycle of the materials used to produce goods.

The next question is an EXCEPT question, which asks you to find an answer choice that is not supported by the passage. It is being included here because it asks about the previous passage. Answering this question should also give you further practice with skimming and scanning for information.

• 91. According to the passage, waste emissions from the Asnaesverket Power Company are used to help produce all of the following EXCEPT:
  1. insulin.
  2. heating oil.
  3. plant fertilizer.
  4. industrial gypsum.

Scan for: waste emissions, insulin, heating oil, fertilizer, gypsum

The best answer is B because the passage doesn’t mention waste emissions from the Asnaesverket Power Company being used to help produce heating oil. The other three answer choices are supported by the passage.

The best answer is NOT:

• A because lines 27–29 state, “Waste steam from the power company is used by Novo Nordisk to heat the fermentation tanks that produce insulin and enzymes.”
• C because the process described in lines 27–29 “creates 700,000 tons of nitrogen-rich slurry a year” (lines 29–30), which Novo Nordisk gives to farmers for use as plant fertilizer.
• D because lines 41–44 state, “The power company also squeezes sulfur from its emissions, but converts most of it to calcium sulfate (industrial gypsum), which it sells to Gyproc for wallboard.”

Scanning for the Conclusion or Main Idea

Often questions ask about the main idea of a passage. This information can sometimes be found in the introduction or conclusion. Taking note of the following transition words can help you identify times when a passage is drawing a conclusion, establishing a cause and effect relationship, or emphasizing a point. Sentences that synthesize information or draw conclusions can be especially helpful when it comes to determining the main idea of a passage.

Transitions That Signal Repetition

Some transition words essentially indicate that information will be repeated. Writers often repeat ideas for emphasis or elaboration. For example, a writer complaining about the lack of vegetarian options at a college dining hall might write the following.

• Example 1

  My dining hall rarely offers meatless entrées; in fact, last week, each entrée contained beef or poultry.

Notice that the second sentence is essentially making the same point as the first sentence does. The second sentence is simply more specific. The phrase “in fact” signals that the second sentence will reiterate the first sentence, usually in more specific terms. Sometimes the sentence that follows “in fact” will reiterate the previous idea in broader or more emphatic terms. Here are several examples of the use of these kinds of transition phrases in context. When you encounter transition words that signal emphasis or repetition, you can speed through the sentences that follow, knowing that they will not be adding any information that differs substantially from the content in the sentence directly prior to the transition phrase.

• Example 2

  “For extended human activities on the Moon or Mars, you must have self-sustaining biological systems, systems that are regenerative,” Dixon says. In other words, green plants. “They give you oxygen, consume your carbon dioxide, and recycle your water.”

• Example 3

  As we move from small to large animals, from mice to elephants or small lizards to Komodo dragons, brain size increases, but not so fast as body size. In other words, bodies grow faster than brains, and large animals have low ratios of brain weight to body weight. In fact, brains grow only about two-thirds as fast as bodies. Since we have no reason to believe that large animals are consistently stupider than their smaller relatives, we must conclude that large animals require relatively less brain to do as well as smaller animals.

• Example 4

  One of the things that I prided myself on was my ability to conceal my thoughts. For example, Rochelle had no idea that I had never even heard of field hockey or intramural sports. I had just looked her in the face and made myself a mirror, frowning when she frowned, raising my eyebrows just seconds after she’d raised hers.

Topic Sentences

The topic sentences should give you a general framework of the content of the full passage. Topic sentences are typically the first sentence of each body paragraph. They give an overview of the paragraph and how it relates to the thesis. Below you will find several topic sentences from a real ACT reading test passage. After reading the topic sentence, predict what the paragraph will be about and compare your prediction to the content of the actual paragraph. You should always read...