College English Test Band 4 Reading 200 Passages (Fifth Edition)

Author: Yang Rongquan, Editor-in-Chief
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, and includes 10 questions, divided into two types: the first 7 questions are true-or-false questions, marked as [Y] (Yes), [N] (No), and [NG] (Not Given); 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 focuses on assessing candidates' ability to understand vocabulary in the context of the passage.
The third and fourth articles are passage-reading comprehension questions, each with a length of over 300 words, covering a wide range of themes and genres. Themes include scientific knowledge, customs and cultures of English-speaking countries, politics, social and economic issues, humanities education, healthcare, and physiological psychology, among others. Genres are mostly narrative, expository, and argumentative texts. This section aims to develop and test the following abilities of candidates: grasping the main idea, understanding the facts and details that support the main idea, analyzing, inferring, and judging based on the passage, and identifying 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 based on their own circumstances, starting from slower to faster.
At the end of the book, there are two appendices: one provides a concise introduction to three different reading techniques and how to read for the best results, and the other includes reference answers for all 50 units.