College English Reading Practice 200 Passages. 5th Edition

Author: Yang Rongquan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-04-01
Features: This book consists of 50 units, each including 4 articles.
The first article is for fast reading, with a length of over 1,000 words, mostly practical texts, containing 10 questions, divided into two types: the first 7 questions are true-or-false questions, with [Y] [N] [NG] representing Yes, No, and Not Given respectively; the last 3 questions are sentence completion questions. This section is mainly designed to cultivate and test candidates' various fast-reading skills, especially their ability to summarize, infer, and locate information.
The second article is vocabulary comprehension at the paragraph level, with a length of over 200 words, diverse themes, and strong readability. The vocabulary tested is generally concrete words, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. This section is mainly intended to assess candidates' ability to understand vocabulary in the context of the passage.
The third and fourth articles are passage reading comprehension questions, with a length of over 300 words, rich in themes and genres. The themes include scientific knowledge, customs and cultures of English-speaking countries, politics, socioeconomics, humanities education, healthcare, and physiological psychology, etc. The genres are mostly narrative, expository, and argumentative texts. This section aims to cultivate and test the following abilities of candidates: grasping the main idea, understanding the facts and details that support the main idea, being able to analyze, infer, and judge based on the content of the passage, and being able to grasp the author's perspective and attitude.
The time to complete each unit is 40 minutes: 15 minutes for fast reading and 25 minutes for careful reading. Candidates can gradually improve their reading speed from slow to fast based on their own conditions.
There are two appendices at the end of the book: one introduces three different reading techniques in concise language, as well as how to read for the best results; the other provides reference answers for the 50 units.