Need reading help or have you said, “Please help me read!”? Perhaps you struggle with reading. Get reading help and advice for the exam on this webpage.
Get Reading Help Online:
Glendale Community College has an excellent page on how to speed read.
It has five different speed reading techniques for you to try out, with exercises and examples.
The Study Guides and Strategies website also has an article on speed reading.
They explain how reading speed can affect reading comprehension.
Their information and techniques are therefore very useful for the exam.
Please click on the white space within this box and CPT reading tips will appear below.
Reading Skills on the CPT
The examination has a section on reading comprehension skills.
In this part of the test, you will see brief reading texts, and then you will have to answer questions on each one.
There will be different types of reading questions.
Main idea questions:
Perhaps the most common type is the main idea question.
For this type of question, you will need to determine the central point that the writer is making in the text.
Bear in mind that the main idea is often provided in the first or last sentence of the first paragraph of the text.
Specific detail questions:
There will also be questions asking you to identify specific information in the text.
You need to look carefully at the question to identify its key words.
Then try to find sentences containing synonyms for these key words within the text.
Inferential questions:
You will also see questions asking you to identify the author’s purpose or to draw some kind of inference or conclusion from the reading passage.
These types of questions are generally the most difficult for students to answer.
You need to try to read between the lines of the passage, without jumping to any wild conclusions that are not supported by the text.
One tip for these types of questions is to look for adjectival phrases that demonstrate the author’s opinion or point of view.
Examples of adjectivals include phrases such as “the most important” or “a significant achievement.”