4°CO Reading Skills Unit 1 Classroom Version TEXT 3

1.
5 Practise your active reading skills
Remember 1.5 Practise your active reading skills

When skimming
and scanning the Here are two examples of the different types of reading passages which you may be
passages try to given in an examination. Practise reading through them and see how easily you can
identify the main grasp their meaning.
points of their
content and to Informative writing
keep these clearly
in mind when
The extract below is a straightforward piece of informative writing.
answering the » Its intention is to explain something to you, and when you are reading it you are
questions.
likely to be scanning it for useful facts and details.
» Unlike the passage about spotting whales in Australia, it does not contain any
Key terms photographs or sub-headings which may help to convey the writer’s meaning. You
Informative writing: will, therefore, need to think carefully about the meaning as you read through it.
A type of non-fiction Try to identify the main points of the writer’s argument and separate them from
writing that gives
the examples he gives to illustrate them.
factual information
about something.
Study tip
Examples of
informational A useful tip when reading this type of writing is to assume that each new paragraph deals with an
writing can be found important new point. If you can identify the topic sentence in each paragraph, you will have found
in newspapers, and a good ‘hook’ on which to hang your understanding.
reference books. For example, in the third paragraph of this passage the opening sentence is clearly the topic
Topic sentence: sentence as it states the main point of the paragraph and then the following sentences develop
The sentence this point. Spotting the topic sentences helps you to keep a tight control over your understanding
in a paragraph of a writer’s argument.
that sums up the
main idea of the Points to consider:
paragraph. It is
often, but not » Skim through the passage and make a note of the opening words of each
always, the opening paragraph – do these give a clear pointer to what each paragraph is about? Is the
sentence of that
opening sentence of a paragraph in this article always the topic sentence?
paragraph.
» Have you noticed any words that the writer uses whose meaning you are not sure
of? Make a note of these words, but don’t worry about them.
» Now look at the closing sentence of paragraphs 2, 3 and 4; in what way do these
relate to and clarify the introductory point being made in the first paragraph?
» Now that you’ve thought about the overall structure of the writer’s argument, read
through the whole passage carefully and, while doing so, try to make sense of any
words whose meaning you are not sure of by using clues from their context.
Exercise 4
1 Using your own words, explain what the text means by:
• ‘Man is, pre-eminently, the animal who communicates’ (line x)
• ‘the electric telegraph was regarded as a superfluous novelty’ (line x)
• ‘a cocoon of copper wires around the world’ (line x)
2 From paragraph 2, using your own words explain why it was not possible to use
the early ‘submarine cables’ for telephone calls across the Atlantic.
3 Using your own words explain what were the ‘yet more problems’ mentioned in
paragraph 4 and say what solved them.
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1 Active reading
Voice Across the Sea

Man is, pre-eminently,
the animal who
communicates, but
until little more than a
5 hundred years ago his
thoughts could travel
abroad no more swiftly
than the sailing ship or
the running horse.
10 The great change
began when lightning
itself became a
messenger for
mankind. At first, the
15 electric telegraph was
regarded as a
superfluous novelty, but within a single lifetime engineers had spun a cocoon of copper
wires around the world. In 1886 was laid the first successful Atlantic cable. From that
moment, Europe and America were only seconds, and no longer days, apart. However, even
20 when the telephone was invented in 1876 it was not possible to speak across the Atlantic;
the early submarine cables could carry only telegraph messages. They were too sluggish to
respond to the hundredfold-more-rapid vibrations of the human voice. Although a
transatlantic telephone service was opened in 1927, it depended entirely on radio, which
meant that even at the best of times conversations were liable to fadings and cracklings, and
to eerie, Outer Space whistles and wails.
25
The first transatlantic telephone cable went into service in 1956. As a result of the vastly
improved service, there was an immediate jump in the number of calls between Europe and
America. More cables had to be laid – first across the Atlantic and later across the still wider
expanses of the Pacific.
30 By the dawn of the Space Age, therefore, the problem of inter-continental telephone calls
had been solved – but it had been solved so successfully that it had raised yet more
problems. The cables could carry only a limited number of conversations, and it seemed
unlikely that they could keep up with the rising demand. Moreover, just as the Victorian
cables could not cope with the telephone, so the submarine cables of the 1950s were
35 unable to deal with the latest miracle, television – and for very similar reasons. The electric
signals involved in the transmission of TV pictures were a thousand times too complex to be
handled by a cable. A new breakthrough was needed and the satellites provided it in the nick
of time.
From Voice Across the Sea, by Arthur C. Clarke, Harper and Row, 1958
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9781510421318_IGCSE_English_4e_Unit 1.indd 12 26/10/2017 08:57

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1.

5 Practise your active reading skills

Remember 1.5 Practise your active reading skills

9781510421318_IGCSE_English_4e_Unit 1.indd 11 26/10/2017 08:57

Voice Across the Sea

9781510421318_IGCSE_English_4e_Unit 1.indd 12 26/10/2017 08:57

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