سر سری خواندن و تحلیل کردن

Finding Information - Skimming and Scanning

In this lesson I just want to introduce two ideas, two skills that you’ll be using, define them and talk about why they are helpful for the TOEFL.

These two skills are skimming and scanning. They have something in common, they are both ways of finding information, as I suggested by the name of this lesson.

And more specifically, they are ways of finding information in reading but not reading everything.

So you can always find information by reading the whole text, right? These are ways to do it faster without reading all the words.

So, for example, we have a reading passage here. Don’t read this, it’s too small.

You’re going to hurt your eyes. So just to give you an idea of what a TOEFL text looks like.

And if you are skimming, you’re going to go through all of that information there, and you’re going to try to find some, not specific, some general ideas. The main ideas of that long text.

So you might, for example, look at the first paragraph here, find the main idea. Then look at the second paragraph, find the main idea, etc. And I will talk more in a later lesson about how to do that. On the other hand, scanning is a little bit different. It’s not a summarization. It’s more finding specific information, finding details.

So in a way, skimming is about general ideas and scanning is about specifics. Okay, so if we are scanning, we look at this big text and we don’t think about paragraph one and paragraph two like we did in skimming.

We are just trying to find specific words or phrases. So let’s look at one paragraph and make it a little bit bigger so that you can actually see the words here.

And if you’re scanning, you might look at this phrase, or this phrase, or this phrase. So you’re looking for very specific points, trying to find them. So here, for example, we’re looking at animals, fish, reptiles, animal kingdom.

So maybe if my question is about animals, then I would scan to find that information and locate this here.

So scanning is really looking at individual words. It’s really helpful for the reading section. It’s important for most question types. And that’s it for skimming and scanning. We’ll talk more in future lessons.