Effective reading

Reading is a purposeful activity and you read different texts for different purposes. Reading is an interactive process because while reading you have to construct the meaning from the words in the text using your knowledge of language, your subject and the world. Before you start reading a text in detail, it is important to find out whether the text is worth reading. In order to achieve this, you may use one of the following strategies:

  1. Surveying the text
  2. Scanning the text
  3. Skimming the text

Content

Reading for detail

Task 1

Read the text The future of the pencil about an eight-generation family firm Faber-Castell, which shows how innovation never stops and answer the following questions.

  1. What was the pencil used for by famous people in history?

    to prepare battle plans, to press tobacco in the pipe, to draw paintings.

  2. How long has the pencil been produced and where?

    Since 1761, Stein near Nuremberg

  3. Why is the task of improving the Faber-Castell pencil referred to as daunting?

    Because the product is believed to be perfect.

  4. What is the impact of the computer age on the sales of the pencil?

    Despite people's beliefs, the sales continue to grow.

  5. How does the pencil sell in different markets?

    In European markets the sales grow slowly, in emerging markets it does well, especially in China, and the company's market share is increasing in the developed countries mainly by improving the pencil.

  6. Make a list of all the innovations in the pencil.

    Hexagonal shape preventing the pencil from rolling off the table, rubber eraser on the back of the pencil, firmer lead, wood preventing the lead from breaking, water-based environmentally friendly paints without harmful chemicals, ergonomic triangular shape, rubbery dots.

Faber-Castell: The future of the pencil

A wonderful tool with many uses

ULYSSES GRANT, an American general, jotted down battle plans with one. Otto von Bismarck, a Prussian chancellor, used his to tamp down the tobacco in his pipe. Vincent van Gogh used one to “draw a woman sewing” and found they “produce a marvellous black and are very agreeable to work with.” Craftsmen have made pencils in Stein, near Nuremberg, for nearly four centuries. Faber-Castell, the world's biggest branded pencil manufacturer, has done so since 1761. Its task is daunting: to improve a product that pencil-lovers insist has been perfect for well over a century. Among these is Count Anton Wolfgang von Faber-Castell, a dapper former investment banker and the eighth member of his family to run the firm. “At my home I have a Faber-Castell pencil I bought from an antique dealer that must be from 1890 or 1895,” he says. “It writes perfectly, even after all these years. That's the fantastic thing with a pencil.”

Many people thought that pencils would become obsolete in the computer age, yet sales continue to grow. Perhaps 15 billion-20 billion are made each year, roughly half of them in China. Faber-Castell produces about 2.2 billion. They are cheap, sturdy and popular in schools, especially in poor countries. As countries grow richer, children's pencil cases grow fatter, though only up to a point. Sales of pencils in most European countries are growing only slowly, if at all. Faber-Castell, however, has kept growing despite the recession. In its past financial year sales increased by almost 6%. The firm does well in emerging markets with vast numbers of bright-eyed schoolchildren. It is also grabbing market share in the rich world by making its pencils better. This is nothing new for Faber-Castell. Lothar von Faber, the great-grandson of the company's founder, took over in 1839 and invented the hexagonal pencil. By cutting the edges off a cylindrical one, he stopped it from rolling off a table.

Faber-Castell's second big innovation was stolen. In 1875 America's Supreme Court ruled that Faber was entitled to put rubber erasers onto the back of its pencils, although another inventor had already patented the idea. The court felt that the idea was too obvious to patent.

Since then, years of research have gone into making leads firmer and finding the type of wood that best protects them from breaking when dropped. But for scribblers, three ideas stand out. First, Faber-Castell started using water-based, environmentally friendly paints in the 1990s. Teachers and parents, who used to worry that children would swallow toxins while chewing their pencils, would have preferred plain wooden ones. But children love bright colours. So Count Faber-Castell reworked his entire process to accommodate new paints without harmful chemicals. Teachers in Europe now urge parents to buy them by name. The count's second innovation was to introduce an ergonomic triangular shape that is popular with children. His third was to add rubbery dots that keep the pencils from slipping out of sweaty little hands.

As for the future, Count Faber-Castell still sees scope for further refinement. Pencils could perhaps be made tougher, or easier on the eye. But the basic design—graphite encased in wood—is unlikely to change much in the next ten to 15 years, he says. Asked about the next 100, he laughs. That may be for another generation to decide.

Source: The Economist, Sep 18th, 2010. https://www.economist.com/business/2010/09/16/the-future-of-the-pencil

Task 2

Complete the text The secrets of successful listening by putting paragraphs A-F in the correct place 1-6.

The secrets of successful listening

1. “When people talk, listen completely.” Those words of Ernest Hemingway might be a pretty good guiding principle for many managers, as might the dictum enunciated by Zeno of Citium, a Greek philosopher: “We have two ears and one mouth, so we should listen more than we say.” For people like being listened to.

2. Listening has been critical to the career of Richard Mullender, who was a British police officer for 30 years. Eventually he became a hostage negotiator, dealing with everything from suicide interventions to international kidnaps. By the end of his stint in uniform, he was the lead trainer for the Metropolitan Police’s hostage-negotiation unit.

3. Plenty of people think that good listening is about nodding your head or keeping eye contact. But that is not really listening, Mr Mullender argues. A good listener is always looking for facts, emotions, and indications of the interlocutor’s values. And when it comes to a negotiation, people are looking for an outcome. The aim of listening is to ascertain what the other side is trying to achieve.

4. Hostage negotiators usually work in teams, but the lead negotiator is the only one who talks. “What we teach is that the second person in the team doesn’t really talk at all, because if they are busy thinking about the next question to ask, they aren’t really listening,” Mr Mullender explains.

5. Of course, a listener needs to speak occasionally. One approach is to make an assessment of what the other person is telling you and then check it with them (“It seems to me that what you want is X”). That gives the other party a sense that they are being understood. The fundamental aim is to build up a relationship, so the other person likes you and trusts you, Mr Mullender says.

6. But Mr Mullender says that too much is made of body language. It is much easier to understand someone if you can hear them but not see them, than if you can see but not hear them. He prefers to negotiate by telephone.

7. The lockdown has increased the need for managers to listen to workers, since the opportunities for casual conversation have dwindled. Mr Mullender thinks that many people have become frustrated in their isolation, which can lead to stress and anger. He thinks there may be a business opportunity in helping managers listen more efficiently, so they can enhance employee well-being. After a year of isolation, many workers would probably love the chance to be heard.

  1. Another important point to bear in mind is that, when you talk, you are not listening. “Every time you share an opinion, you give out information about yourself,” Mr Mullender says. In contrast, a good listener, by keeping quiet, gains an edge over his or her counterpart.
  2. The pandemic has meant that most business conversations now take place on the phone or online. Precious few in-person meetings occur. Some might think this makes listening more difficult; it is harder to pick up the subtle cues that people reveal in their facial expressions and body language.
  3. When he left the force in 2007, he realised that his skills might be applicable in the business world. So, he set up a firm called the Listening Institute. Mr Mullender defines listening as “the identification, selection and interpretation of the key words that turn information into intelligence”. It is crucial to all effective communication.
  4. Another key to good listening is paying attention and avoiding distraction. In the information age, it is all too easy for focus to drift to a news headline, a TikTok video or the latest outrage on Twitter. In another study in the Harvard Business Review, participants paired with distracted listeners felt more anxious than those who received full attention.
  5. The mistake many people make is to ask too many questions, rather than letting the other person talk. The listener’s focus should be on analysis. If you are trying to persuade someone to do something, you need to know what their beliefs are. If someone is upset, you need to assess their emotional state.
  6. Some firms use a technique known as a “listening circle” in which participants are encouraged to talk openly and honestly about the issues they face (such as problems with colleagues). In such a circle, only one person can talk at a time and there is no interruption. A study cited in the Harvard Business Review found that employees who had taken part in a listening circle subsequently suffered less social anxiety and had fewer worries about work-related matters than those who did not.

Source: The Economist, Jan 21st 2021.

Task 3

Complete the text Harvard report using the expressions in the box. There are more words than you need.

Harvard Report

As an experiment, Dr. Perry (psychologist), Director of the Harvard Reading-Study Center gave 1500 first year students a thirty-page chapter from a history book to read, with the explanation that in about twenty minutes they would be stopped and asked to the important details and to write an essay on what they had read. The class scored well on a multiple-choice test on detail, but only fifteen students of 1500 were able to write a short on what the chapter was all about in terms of its basic theme. Only fifteen of 1500 top first year college students had thought of reading the paragraph marked "Summary", or of skimming down the flags in the margin. This demonstration of "obedient purposelessness" is of "an enormous amount of wasted effort" in the study skills of first year students. Some it almost as cheating to look ahead or skip around. To most students, the way they study expresses "their relationship to the pressures and rituals of safe passage to the next grade".

Students must be jarred out of this . The exercise of judgment in reading requires , even courage, on the part of the student who must decide for himself what to read or skip. Dr. Perry suggested that students ask themselves what it is they want to get out of a reading assignment, then look around for those points. Instructors can help them see the major forms in which material is cast. Students should also "talk to themselves" while reading, asking "is this the point I'm looking for?"

Source: https://www.bestcolleges.com/blog/how-many-college-students-in-the-us/

Task 4

Complete the text Two centuries of rapid global population growth will come to an end using ONE word.

Two centuries of rapid global population growth will come to an end

One of the big lessons from the demographic history of countries is that population explosions are temporary. For many countries the demographic transition has already ended, and as the global fertility rate has now halved we know that the world as a whole is approaching the end of rapid population growth.

As we explore at the beginning of the entry on population growth, the global population only very slowly up to 1700 – only 0.04% year. In the many millennia up to that point in history, very high mortality of children counteracted high fertility. The world was in the first stage of the demographic transition.

Once health improved and mortality things changed quickly. Particularly over the course of the 20th century: Over the last 100 years the global population more quadrupled. The 7-fold increase of the world population over the course of two centuries amplified humanity’s on the natural environment. To provide space, food, and resources for a large world population in a that is sustainable into the distant future is without question one of the large, serious challenges our generation. We should not make the mistake of underestimating the task of us. Yes, I expect new generations to contribute, but for now it is us to provide for them. Population growth is still fast: Every year 140 million are born and 58 million die – the is the number of people that we add to the world population in a year: 82 million.

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