‫We're now going to take a deeper look at what the skills of skimming, scanning and reading for detail
‫are.
‫By the end of the lesson, you'll understand what these key reading skills are and how they can help
‫us in the Alps reading test.
‫But first, let's take a look at the reading skills broken down into two groups we have locating information
‫and we can consider skimming and scanning the main skills for doing this.
‫We also have comprehension, which is reading for detail and reading for full understanding.
‫First, let's take a look at skimming, which is reading a text very quickly to get the overall general
‫idea when skimming.
‫We don't read every word carefully.
‫Skimming is also a kind of speed reading, and we use it to locate key words, numbers and figures.
‫In actual fact, when we are scanning, we hardly read any of the words in the text.
‫Now, let's look at comprehension when reading for detail, we're reading to carefully understand the
‫full text, meaning you will only want to carefully read small parts of text in the Alps reading test
‫that because of the ELT reading time limit, if you were to carefully read every single word in the
‫articles given to you during the test, you will not have enough time to complete all questions when
‫answering questions in the Alps reading test, you will want to use all three skills and they do work
‫very nicely together.
‫They will help you to answer questions quickly and carefully.
‫So how do the core reading skills work together?
‫Well, first you will want to skim and scan over big pieces of text.
‫This will help you to locate the information that you want to get out of the text to answer questions.
‫Once we have located the passage or part of the text that we want to know more about, we can then read
‫for detail, which means to get a full understanding of the texts.
‫Meaning?
‫We can think of it as step one, being skimming and scanning and step two as reading for detail.
‫In terms of the Alps reading test, we can think of the steps like this, we are given a question that
‫we must answer.
‫So first we need to locate where the answer is to do so.
‫We will skim and scan through the whole text instead of reading every single word.
‫Once we've located roundabouts where the answer should be, we can then use that to reading for detail
‫to get our full answer to the question.
‫By using these three core skills, we can definitely answer all of the questions in the aisles reading
‫test and stick to the time limit.
‫Let's take a look at some examples of what skimming is.
‫I'll show you a question where you'll need to use skimming and it will be similar to something you could
‫get in the aisles reading tests and then show you the text.
‫So choose the heading that best matches the paragraph.
‫Children are addicted to work or parents are partly to blame for work addiction.
‫And here is the text, but to skim read, I only want you to read the first and last sentence in the
‫text.
‫This is a very useful skim reading technique.
‫So please only read the first and last sentence in the text to answer the question.
‫Here it is.
‫Let me read through these two sentences as well.
‫Work addiction may be caused in part by a person being pushed too hard by his or her parents in their
‫earlier life.
‫Whatever the case may be, our families play a major role in developing an addiction to working.
‫So which of the two headings matches best, either children are addicted to work or parents partly to
‫blame for work addiction?
‫Well, it's actually parents partly to blame for work addiction, as the two sentences highlight that
‫families and parents pushing children can cause work addiction.
‫So here we can see how skim reading the first and last sentence can really speed up our understanding
‫of a text, meaning let's move on to scanning so much like skimming, I'll show you a question similar
‫to something you might get in the alts reading test.
‫Then I'll show you the text where you can find the answer.
‫Now, I want you to do this as quickly as possible, so try and find that answer in as short a time
‫as you can.
‫Here's the question.
‫What is the name of the tech expert in the article?
‫So there's a clue here.
‫We're looking for a name.
‫And of course, a name requires capital letters.
‫This might help you find your answer.
‫So here it is.
‫So did you manage to find the name of the technology or tech expert in this article?
‫Well, Don, if you did and the answer is Ben would.
‫We can see from this example of scanning for information that we hardly need to look at any of the words
‫in the text, and we simply run our eyes quickly over the text to find the key information we need.
‫So let's take a look at reading for detail.
‫The main goal of this short paragraph is to agree that crime is sometimes justified or OK or suggest
‫businesses can learn from illegal organizations.
‫OK, here is your text and please read it very carefully.
‫I'll give you some time to do so.
‫OK, let's move on to see what the answer to this question is, is the main goal either to agree that
‫crime is sometimes justified or that businesses can learn from illegal organizations?
‫If you need more time, please do pause the video.
‫So the answer is that businesses can learn from illegal organizations.
‫For this question time, it would be hard to answer by only skimming and scanning because we wouldn't
‫really get a full understanding of the whole text.
‫So we need to carefully read all the words in the paragraph we can see.
‫OK, so let's quickly go over these three core reading skills and I will say will be practicing them
‫throughout the remainder of this course.
‫So, OK, first we have skimming.
‫Here is an overview of what skimming is.
‫Skimming is very fast reading.
‫We're reading only to understand what the overall idea of the text is.
‫And this can be done by running your eyes fairly quickly over a text.
‫And this will help us to internalize or understand what the key words in the text are.
‫You can also quickly read the first or last sentence in the paragraph, just as we did previously.
‫And you can also look at the first sentence only as this will sometimes give you some indication of
‫what the text, the paragraph or the passage is about.
‫The first sentence is often called the topic sentence, which you may remember from the alts writing
‫section of this course.
‫So that is skimming and a few ways that you can skim read.
‫Now let's move on to scanning.
‫Scouting is also a kind of fast reading, and in actual fact, we can consider it rapid reading, you're
‫hardly going to read any of the words in the text, if any at all, read the question and search for
‫keywords or synonyms associated with the question.
‫For example, if the question is asking you about sports, you may want to look out for the name of
‫certain sports like basketball or football.
‫You may find that the answer to the question is hidden in that part of the text.
‫Remember that if you're looking out for dates or figures, you need to look for numbers.
‫And if you're looking for the names of things, you need to remember to look for capital letters, just
‫like in our example.
‫And here is reading for detail.
‫Reading for detail is often the final stage of reading comprehension.
‫First, you may want to skim and scan to find out where the information you want to learn about is.
‫We read text to fully understand its meaning.
‫When we read for detail, we read every word carefully and think about what its meaning is.
‫Again, I will say you will not want to read every single word in the aisles reading test as quite simply,
‫you will run out of time.
‫So that brings us to the end of our lesson on skimming, scanning and reading for detail.
‫But we will be practicing the skills again later in this section of the course.
‫So that brings us to the end of the lesson, and I will see you again soon.