Section A Exploratory Reading
Scan the TV Schedule as quickly as possible to find the answer to the following questions.
Questions
1. You are thinking about traveling to the USA for a vacation. Which show should you watch?
2. Your friend doesn't have a TV, but would like to watch a film starring Tom Cruise. Which film should you record on your video?
3. You like modern art. Which documentary should you watch?
Explanations
1. The key is “Travel Abroad”. Here, we may look for words that are bold faced. If we are thinking about traveling to the USA for a vacation, of course we should watch “Travel Abroad”.
2. The key is “Pretty Boy”. According to the table, “Pretty Boy—Tom Cruise, the prettiest boy of them all, in an action packed thriller about Internet espionage.”
3. The key is “Art for Everyone”. We know the answer from the bold faced title and the definition: “MOMA: Art for Everyone—A fascinating documentary that helps you enjoy the difference between pointilism and video installations.”
Reading Skill: Scanning for Specific Information
Scanning is a reading strategy used to find specific information quickly. We use this reading skill when looking up a word in the dictionary or a person's telephone number in the telephone book. Usually, we search for key words or ideas. Scanning involves: 1)knowing what we are looking for, so we are concentrating on finding a particular answer; 2)moving our eyes rapidly and systematically over the page; 3)ignoring everything that isn't relevant to our purpose; 4)reading more slowly when you locate your key information. In other words, scanning is not only used to help you to gather data on exactly what we want to know and quickly move through sections that are not relevant to your purpose but also used to save time and locate particular relevant information, like the answer to a question, in a long text. Meanwhile when scanning, we should look for the author's use of organizers such as numbers, letters, steps, or the transitional words: first, second, or next. We should also look for words that are bold faced, italics, or in a different font size, style, or color, etc.