Skimming and Scanning:

What are they?

 They are like a fourth gear – or overdrive
– in reading, in which you read only
enough of the material to give you the
ideas or information you want or need.

 There are four ways of reading. What are

they??
Four ways in Reading

 Careful reading - studying or reading complex material, reading

intensively and/or making decisions about the material you’re reading

 Usual reading, casual reading - reading newspapers, magazines, or novel

 Accelerated reading - because of lack of time and great quantities of

material to cover, to alert yourself, read aggressively, to maintain a
much higher rate than your usual rate, demands a greater expenditure of
energy than most people can maintain for long periods of time, so you
use this third gear only occasionally, when the situation demand

 Skimming and Scanning - you deliberately look for certain parts, and
you skip over a great deal of the material
Difference between Skimming &
Scanning
 Scanning rapidly covers a great deal of material in order to locate
fact or piece of information. It is to look for one thing in
particular.
 Very useful in finding a specific name, date, statistics, or fact without
reading the entire article.

 Skimming rapidly covers a great deal of material in order to

identify general overview of the content.
 You may be interested in the “gist” of an article, or you may want to
sample a book in the library before deciding to take it out.
Read through the following passage and answer the questions.

The Black Death

The Black Death, a terrible plague, reached England in 1348. It spread from the port of
Weymouth to Bristol and, in spite of closing the roads, quickly spread to Gloucester. It
then passed to Oxford and from there to London. By the spring it was at its height. It
seemed to attack men rather than women, and the young and strong rather than the
elderly.
The plague continued to ravage Europe for centuries. The Tudor period saw repeated
plagues. People carried sponges soaked in vinegar and posies of flowers, called tussie-
mussies, to ward off the plague fumes. They did not realise that the plague was carried by
the fleas on the rats they saw everywhere.

When did the plague reach England?---------------------------------------

Who seemed the most likely to be infected by the plague?---------
How did people avoid the plague?-------------------------------------------
What was the plague really caused by?------------------------------------
SCANNING

 What would you scan when you are doing research for an oral
presentation?
ACTIVITY:PREVIEW

 Write a preview of any recent book that you have read.

Practice Activities
Scanning for Details: Exercise 2

1. How often are members of the House of Representative chosen?

2. How old must a Senator be to be elected?
3. To be a Senator, how long must he or she have been a citizen of
the United States?
4. How long must a Representative be a citizen of the United
States before he or she can be elected?
5. Who is the President of the Senate?
6. Originally, who chose the Senators?
 Section 2
Clause 1:
 The House of Representatives shall be composed of Members
chosen every second Year by the People of the several States, and
the Electors in each State shall have the Qualifications requisite for
Electors of the most numerous Branch of the State Legislature.
Clause 2:
 No Person shall be a Representative who shall not have attained to
the Age of twenty five Years, and been seven Years a Citizen of the
United States, and who shall not, when elected, be an Inhabitant of
that State in which he shall be chosen.
 Section 3
Clause 1:
 The Senate of the United States shall be composed of two Senators from each
State, chosen by the Legislature thereof, for six Years; and each Senator shall
have one Vote.
Clause 2: (omitted)
Clause 3:
 No Person shall be a Senator who shall not have attained to the Age of thirty
Years, and been nine Years a Citizen of the United States, and who shall not,
when elected, be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen.
Clause 4:
 The Vice President of the United States shall be President of the Senate, but shall
have no Vote, unless they be equally divided.
3. Making Inferences

 Making an inference is also known as reading between the lines. 

The reader must put together the information the author provides
and the information that the reader already knows to come up
with the answer.  
the text + previous knowledge = inference

 You make an inference when you use clues from the story to
figure out something that the author doesn't tell you.
Inferring Meaning

 Consider the following statement:

 The Senator admitted owning the gun that killed his wife.
On the face of it, we have a simple statement about what someone said. Our understanding,
however, includes much that is not stated. We find meaning embedded in the words and
phrases. Unpacking that meaning, we can see that the Senator was married and his wife is now
dead—although this is not actually stated as such. (In fact, the sentence is about an admission
of gun ownership.) It is as though the single sentence contains a number of assertions:
 There is a Senator.
 He owns a gun.
 He is married.
 His wife is dead.
 That gun caused her death.
 The Senator admitted owning that gun.
 Clearly, the original sentence is a clearer and simpler way of conveying all of this information.
On a more subtle level, we recognize that a public figure confronts involvement in a major
crime. Our understanding need not stop there. We infer that the gun (or at least a bullet) has
probably been recovered and identified as the murder weapon.
Making Inferences 1
 Mrs. Green just finished college. She applied for a job at the school in
town to be a first grade teacher. She had wanted to be a teacher since
she was a little girl. She had heard that the school was looking for
someone who had experience as a teacher so when she got a call from the
principal to come in for an interview, she was happy and excited! On the
day of the interview, Mrs. Green went to the school and saw four other
people there. They were also at the school for interviews. All of them
were older than she was and looked very confident. Mrs. Green’s heart
“sunk”.

 What do you know?

 What can you infer?
 What clues do you have?
Activity 2
Turner almost wished that he hadn’t listened to the radio. He went to
the closet and grabbed his umbrella. He would feel silly carrying it
to the bus stop on such a sunny morning.
Which probably happened?
a. Turner had promised himself to do something silly that
morning.
b. Turner had heard a weather forecast that predicted rain.
c. Turner planned to trade his umbrella for a bus ride.
Activity 3
“Larry, as your boss, I must say that it’s been very interesting working
with you,” Miss Valdez said. “However, it seems that our company’s
needs and your performance style are not well matched. Therefore, it
makes me very sad to have to ask you to resign your position effective
today.”

What was Miss Valdez telling Larry?

a. She would feel really bad if he decided to quit.
b. He was being fired.
c. He was getting a raise in pay.
d. She really enjoyed having him in the office.
The following story is often presented as a
brain twister. In fact, it’s a reading
exercise.
 A man and his son are driving in a car. The car crashes into a tree,
killing the father and seriously injuring his son. At the hospital,
the boy needs to have surgery. Upon looking at the boy, the
doctor says (telling the truth), "I cannot operate on him. He is my
son.“

How can this be?

Making Inferences About
Characters
 caring

 optimistic

 selfish

 stubborn
4. Lateral Questions
 Such questions need you to pay close attention to the exact
wordings of the questions.
 Lateral thinking, is the ability to think creatively, or
"outside the box" as it is sometimes referred to in
business, to use your inspiration and imagination to solve
problems by looking at them from unexpected
perspectives. Lateral thinking involves discarding the
obvious, leaving behind traditional modes of thought, and
throwing away preconceptions.
 A farmer has five haystacks in one field and four haystacks in
another. How many haystacks would he have if he combined
them all in one field?
 A truck driver went down a one-way street in the wrong direction,
but didn't break the law. The police man standing nearby doesn’t
stop him. How come?
 Adults are holding children, waiting their turn. The children are
handed (one at a time, usually) to a man, who holds them while a
woman shoots them. If the child is crying, the man tries to stop
the crying before the child is shot.
 A traveler arrives in a small town and decides he wants to get a
haircut. According to the manager of the hotel where he's staying,
there are only two barbershops in town — one on East Street and
one on West Street. The traveler goes to check out both shops.
The East Street barbershop is a mess, and the barber has the worst
haircut the traveler has ever seen. The West Street barbershop is
neat and clean; its barber's hair looks as good as a movie star's.
 Which barbershop does the traveler go to for his haircut, and why?
 A man lives on the tenth floor of a building. Every day he takes
the elevator to go down to the ground floor to go to work or to go
shopping. When he returns he takes the elevator to the seventh
floor and walks up the stairs to reach his apartment on the tenth
floor. He hates walking so why does he do it?
 A man walks into a bar and asks the barman for a glass of water.
The barman pulls out a gun and points it at the man. The man
says ‘Thank you’ and walks out.
 A man pushed his car. He stopped when he reached a hotel at
which point he knew he was bankrupt. Why?