Speed Reading - Key to Comprehension Problems

In a typical aptitude test, comprehension is one of the major portion besides QA, verbal and others. In comprehension section, you have to master large volumes of information and solve the questions based on them. With speed reading you'll be able to quickly understand the given text and solve the questions in a lot less time.
As the time to solve comprehension questions is same for all, if you are a speed reader, you'll be able to solve more questions in given time span. Below we discuss, how one can increase the reading speed and quickly understand the text.

The most important trick about speed reading is to know what information you want from a document before you start reading it: if you only want an outline of the issue that the document discusses, then you can skim the document quickly and extract only the essential facts. If you need to understand the real detail of the document, then you need to read it slowly enough to understand it fully.

Technical Issues

The reading speed can be enhanced by following these technical improvements:

• Eye span - Increasing the number of words read in each block.


• Fixation - Reducing the length of time spent reading each block.


• Regression - Reducing the number of times your eyes skip back to a previous sentence.

Eye span
Try to increase the number of words that you read at a time: With practice, you'll find you read faster. You may also find that you can increase the number of words in each block by holding the text a little farther than usual from your eyes. The more words you can read in each block, the faster you will read.

Fixation
The minimum length of time needed to read each block is probably only a quarter of a second. By pushing yourself to reduce the time you take, you will get better at picking up information quickly. By working on reducing fixation time for a week or so, you will realise that your reading speed has increased to a great extent.

Regression
Try to reduce the number of times that your eyes skip back to a previous sentence, run a pointer along the line as you read. This could be a finger, or a pen or pencil. Your eyes will follow the tip of your pointer, smoothing the flow of your reading. The speed at which you read using this method will largely depend on the speed at which you move the pointer.

Try to read a daily newspaper and follow these tips and after 10-11 days, you'll observe that your reading speed has almost doubled.

Online tools are also available to test your reading speed e.g. One is available here.

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