2A Skills Practice: Skimming

In a reading exam, there’s always a balance between speed and
understanding, so the second essential time-saving skill you’ll need is
called ‘Skimming’. This basically means looking at the text quickly to get
the general idea, but maybe not the details.

This is a simple technique that you can use to save time in the exam;
simply read the FIRST and LAST SENTENCE of each paragraph and try to
catch a few KEY WORDS in the middle. For example, the follow paragraph
contains 160 words. However if we skim the text, you can see that we only
need to read about 33% of them to get the main idea.