reading for understanding: practice in basic comprehension

99

Reading for Understanding: Practice in Basic

Comprehension Skills

OUTLINE

1 Building a Foundation: Vocabulary, Annotating, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing 10

2 Reading for the Main Idea and Author’s Purpose 44

3 Reading between the Lines: Making Accurate Inferences 78

1P A R T

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1 Building a Foundation: Vocabulary, Annotating, Paraphrasing, and Summarizing

CHAPTER OBJECTIVES

This fi rst chapter will help you improve your reading comprehension by reviewing some essential skills and concepts associated with the reading process:

• Suggestions for improving your vocabulary

• Annotating—reading with a pencil in your hand

• Writing paraphrases

• Writing summaries

IMPROVING YOUR VOCABULARY

A good vocabulary is probably the single most important skill associ-ated with good reading. Every other skill—comprehension, retaining information, making inferences, drawing appropriate conclusions,

C H A P T E R

10


BUILDING A FOUNDATION: VOCABULARY, ANNOTATING, PARAPHRASING, AND SUMMARIZING 11

evaluating—depends on whether you know what the words on the page mean in relation to each other and in their context. After all, if you don’t know what the words on the page mean, you cannot fully know what you are reading. Sometimes it is possible to wing it, get-ting the general idea without having a complete understanding. Most often, however, and especially with the analytical reading you will do in this course, your understanding of a passage may hinge solely on the meaning of a single word, a situation where guessing is hazardous. E. D. Hirsch, a professor of education and humanities at the University of Virginia, offers these remarks on vocabulary and its relationship to reading comprehension:

Vocabulary experts agree that adequate reading comprehension depends on a person already knowing between 90 and 95 percent of the words in a text. Knowing that percentage of words allows the reader to get the main thrust of what is being said and therefore to guess correctly what the unfamiliar words probably mean. (This inferential process is of course how we pick up oral language in early childhood and it sustains our vocabulary growth throughout our lives.) 1

One of my colleagues characterizes the problem of not looking up im-portant words as the “swiss-cheese” approach to reading—as if the text has holes scattered through it, like a slice of swiss cheese. Ignoring new words in your reading assignments, hoping that they don’t really matter or assuming you know what a word means when you really don’t, may impair your comprehension. An incident that occurred recently in one of my classes illustrates these risks. While doing a context clue exercise, the students came across this sentence:

Sue Grafton is a remarkably prolifi c writer. Nearly every year she publishes a new mystery in her alphabet series. The latest book in the series is S Is for Silence.

The answer choices were (a) productive; (b) suspenseful; (c) popular; (d) rich.

Two or three students chose “popular” for the answer because they had always assumed that a prolifi c writer was a popular one. In fact, prolifi c has nothing to do with popularity; it means “produc-tive.” The context clues in the sec-ond and third sentences reinforce

1Quoted in “Reading Comprehension Requires Knowledge,” American Educator, Spring 2003.

OLC Read what happened when athletic shoe maker Reebok failed to consult a dictionary before it released a new line of women’s running shoe called “Incubus.” fi ndarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4182/is_19970220/ai_n10104158 or www.petting-zoo.net/~deadbeef/archive/2298.html


12 READING FOR UNDERSTANDING: PRACTICE IN BASIC COMPREHENSION SKILLS

this defi nition: A writer who publishes a new book nearly every year is certainly productive. Because “S” is the 19th letter of the alphabet, we can infer that Grafton has published 19 mysteries in her series.

Vocabulary in Perspective

The process of acquiring vocabulary is a lifelong pursuit, and it is both naive and unrealistic to think that a single course in reading or in English can remedy your vocabulary weaknesses. At fi rst, learning dozens of new words may seem like a discouraging, perhaps an even overwhelming, prospect, but it is possible. Everyone has to start somewhere, and even the best reader comes across words in his or her daily reading that require looking up. (The fourth edition of The American Heritage Dictionary lists 350,000 words, 16,000 of them new.) To see the dimensions of acquiring an adult-level vocabulary, consider the fi ndings of Richard C. Anderson and William E. Nagy, authorities in reading and educational theory. They estimate that there are approxi-mately 88,000 words in what they call “school English” (compiled from 1,000 items of reading materials from elementary through high school). When they added proper nouns, compound words, multiple meanings of homonyms (words that sound alike but that have different spellings and meanings), and idioms, they estimated that “there may be 180,000 distinct vocabulary items in school English and that an average high school senior may know eight thousand of them.” 2 The sheer number of words in the language partly explains why acquiring a good vocabu-lary takes so long. With more diffi cult assignments the reality in col-lege, a college student is expected to know even more than the numbers that Anderson and Nagy cite. Many studies point to American students’ diminished vocabulary, demonstrating the importance of getting your level up to par at the beginning of your college career. 3

Daily Reading and Vocabulary Improvement—A Personal Sidenote

An exhaustive treatment of vocabulary acquisition is not within the scope of this book. However, resist the temptation to memorize long lists of words; you simply won’t remember many of them. The very best way to learn new words is to read as much as you have time for. Certainly, the reading you will do in this book will expose you to dozens of college-level vocabulary words. Since most of the words you recognize in your reading you know because of prior exposure, it seems obvious that words are best learned—and retained—when you encounter them in your read-ing. Reading for pleasure an hour a day, or at least a half hour a day, will pay big dividends. I can attest to the benefi ts of daily reading as an aid to building vocab-ulary. For the past fi ve years, I have been taking intensive Italian courses.

2Richard C. Anderson and William E. Nagy, “The Vocabulary Conundrum,” American Educator , Winter 1992. 3From Harper’s Index for August 2000: “Average number of words in the written vocabulary of a 6- to 14-year-old American child in 1945: 25,000. Average number today: 10,000.” These fi gures refl ect research done by Gary Ingersoll of Indiana University.



Someone once observed that learning a new language as an adult is as simple as picking up a truck—an apt comparison. Yet I have found that reading Italian short stories, online newspaper articles, and novels—for an hour a day, or at least a half an hour a day—has started to pay off. In Italian, there is a phrase, piano piano , meaning “slowly, slowly.” Vocabulary acquisition occurs this way—little by little. You can’t rush the process, and though the gains one makes in a single day may not seem like much, over a period of weeks or months, these incremental gains eventually add up to something substantial. The experience of learning a foreign language as an adult has given me a renewed appreciation for the diffi culties students have in getting the meanings of new words to stick. It’s discouraging to read a text with a lot of new words: You have to jump back and forth from the page to the dictionary, whether it’s a print or an online dictionary. If there are too many unfamiliar words, it’s tedious. Fortunately, my hour a day self-imposed regimen means that now I don’t need to look up as many new words as I did two years ago. For me, writing meanings of words on index cards was a waste of time. For several weeks, I wrote seemingly hundreds of words on colored cards, but when I reviewed them, I remembered very few because they were too divorced from the pages where I had encoun-tered them. Writing the defi nitions in the margins didn’t work, either. There were too many words, making the page messy, and it was too easy to cheat and consult the defi nition instead of using the context to trigger my memory. So, after a few months of experimenting, I found a system that works for me, and perhaps it will be useful to you as well. As I read, I write down important new words and their meanings, but instead of writing the def-initions in the margin or writing them on index cards, I write them in a binder, along with the page number where they occur in the text. I focus on words that are essential to understanding the story or on words that I have seen before but can’t readily defi ne or remember. A sample: here are three illustrations of my method from the book I’m reading now:

p. 78 stretto —narrow, tight (una strada stretta—a narrow street) intravedere —to catch a glimpse of; also to foresee macchia —a blot, mark, or stain; also macchiato is coffee with

a dash of milk (“stained”)

Now here’s the important part: Just writing them down isn’t enough. Rereading the text immediately after the fi rst reading has resulted in my retaining a much higher percentage of words, which means that when I encounter them again in different contexts, I might not have to look them up again. And while I am rereading the text, if I can’t remember a word, I simply refer to the appropriate page in my notebook. I have gone on at some length about this matter because most stu-dents know that their vocabulary needs work, and they often hope for a



magic formula to help them. There is no magic formula, of course, but a daily dose of reading, looking up words, writing down meanings of key words, and then rereading the material has made me a more confi dent and fl uent reader. It takes discipline to be sure, but the rewards are huge. Ultimately, though, you have to fi nd your own way, and I encourage you to try several methods to fi nd the one that works best for you.

Further Suggestions for Vocabulary Improvement

Besides the binder method, here are some other suggestions to help your vocabulary level:

• Invest in a new hardback dictionary. If you do not have an unabridged dictionary published recently, buy one. It will be money well spent. A new dictionary will last well beyond your college years. Some good dictionaries are listed in the next section.

• Develop an interest in words and their origins. When you look up a new word in an unabridged dictionary, look at its etymology, or his-tory; many English words have unusual origins. The etymology of a word is usually printed in brackets following the defi nitions; it explains and traces the derivation of the word and gives the original meaning in the language or languages the word is derived from. For example, one dictionary traces the history of the word sinister meaning “causing evil” or “presaging trouble” like this:

[Middle English sinister , unfavorable, from Old French, from Latin sinister , on the left, unlucky]

It may be this negative linguistic association that accounts for the histor-ical prejudice against left-handed people. Not too long ago in the United States, children who wrote left-handed were often forced by their well-meaning teachers to switch hands. Here is another example:

The word curfew comes from medieval French. Because most houses in France during the medieval period were made of wood and had thatched roofs, the danger of fi re was always great, particu-larly at night. Every evening residents had to put out their candles when a bell was rung and the order couvrefeu (meaning “cover fi re”) was given. The Norman French conquerors brought the word to England, where it evolved into our word curfew.

• Learn the most common prefi xes and roots . Approximately 60 percent of the words in English come from Latin and around 15 percent come from Greek. Therefore, learning Latin and Greek prefi xes and roots can add to your vocabulary stock. For example, consider the word benediction (“blessing”), which you will encounter later in the chapter. The Latin prefi x bene - always means “good,” and you can see this meaning in the words benefi t , benefi ciary , benefactor , and benefi cence . The Latin root



spirare , meaning “to breathe,” for example, gives us the English words inspire , respiration , per-spiration , conspiracy (literally, to “breathe with”), aspire , and expire . A question on the quiz

show Jeopardy! recently went something like this: “ Spiracles are open-ings on butterfl ies that allow them to do this.” The answer: “What is to breathe?” Even if you know nothing about the anatomy of a butterfl y, knowing the Latin root gets you the right answer.

• Try the three-dot method. When you look up a new word in the dic-tionary, place a small dot with a pencil next to it. The next time you look it up, add a second dot. The third time, add a third dot and learn the meaning of the word. The idea is that any word that crops up three times in a short period of time is probably worth knowing.

• Subscribe to one or more Word-of-the-Day websites. These sites offer a painless, entertaining way to learn new words. Try two or three of those listed in the box on page 25 to see which you prefer. You can either visit the sites every day or, more conveniently, subscribe to their service, which sends the word of the day to your e-mail address. Most offer interesting, relatively challenging words; most include—besides the obvious defi nitions—the etymology and some illustrative sentences using the word. Some include hyperlinks taking you to other sites of interest relevant to the word of the day. All are free, though most do have banner ads. See the critical reading exercise at the end of this section for an exercise in evaluating word-of-the-day sites.

Using the Dictionary Traditional (Print) Dictionaries

No electronic device, no matter how fl ashy, can surpass the convenience and the abundance of information in a good print dictionary. You should have two: an abridged (or shortened) paperback edition for class and an unabridged (complete) to use at home. Both should be up-to-date. (Using your father’s tattered dictionary from the 1970s or a cheap garage-sale edition is a foolish economy; an old dictionary cannot refl ect the wealth of new words that have entered the language even during the past de-cade.) Ask your instructor to recommend one, or choose one from this list. All are available in less expensive college editions.

• The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language • The Random House Webster’s College Dictionary • Webster’s New World Dictionary • Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary

OLC www.mhhe.com/spears

For a comprehensive list of Latin and Greek prefi xes and roots, click on the “Student Edi-tion” button on the website accompanying the text. In the white box labeled “Choose One,” pull down to “Word Parts.”



If you are unsure about how current your dictionary is, fi rst see how many of these current words and phrases you know. Then check to see how many your dictionary contains.

supersize hugfest gabfest biodiesel drama queen fatwa microgreens brewski wiki unibrow fat farm hottie air kiss inner child comb-over podcast blog bimbo computer geek mouse potato soul patch avian (bird) fl u regift telenovelas

Online Dictionaries

The computer revolution has extended to the world of dictionaries. As I proofread this list in the summer of 2008, these are the best known cur-rently available online.

Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary www.m-w.com/ The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language www.bartleby.com/61/ yourDictionary.com www.yourdictionary.com AllWords.com www.allwords.com

Each site works a little differently, and it is worth spending time with each one to see which best suits your needs. Having surveyed these dic-tionaries and having put them through their paces with a few sample words and phrases, I see advantages and disadvantages to their use.

Advantages of Online Dictionaries

• Entries are not cluttered with confusing symbols and multiple defi nitions. • Some texts on websites have links with the American Heritage or

Merriam-Webster’s dictionaries, so that you can click on a word and be taken immediately to the online dictionary entry.

• Most offer pronunciations of words, which you can access by clicking on the sound icon.

• Many offer other amenities like word games, word puzzles, and links to other sites for word lovers.

• The sites are free, though you should expect advertisements; registra-tion is not required.

Disadvantages of Online Dictionaries

• Only the very most common senses are listed; therefore, if the word you are looking up is used in an unusual way, you may not fi nd the defi nition you need.



• Obsolete and archaic forms may not be listed. • Only the American Heritage and Merriam-Webster’s offer variant forms.

(Are both benefi ted and benefi tted correct?) • Most do not provide usage notes, although the American Heritage site

does. For example, that site explains why using debut as a verb is not considered good usage as in, the movie debuted in July. YourDictionary.com alludes to a usage problem, but doesn’t explain what it is. The others have no information about using debut as a verb.

• The etymology (or language of origin) is not always provided. If it is, usually only the source language is provided but not the original mean-ing or an analysis of the word parts.

• Searching for new words and phrases produces unpredictable results. Try, for example, searching for the defi nitions for some of the new words in the list above.

• Unless you have a high-speed connection, access to websites can be slow.

• Looking up a word on your laptop (assuming you have one) isn’t con-venient while riding on the subway or waiting at a doctor’s offi ce. A paperback dictionary is more portable.

• Pop-up and banner ads are annoying and intrusive. • During a power blackout, you’re out of luck!

It seems clear that online dictionaries have their uses, but to rely on one for all one’s college work seems impractical.

Electronic Dictionaries

Many students rely on electronic dictionaries because they are portable and effi cient. However, they do have their limitations, and I recommend a good paperback dictionary as a much less expensive and equally por-table source for looking up new words. A student I tutored recently was struggling with Jonathan Rauch’s rather diffi cult essay, “In Defense of Prejudice: Why Incendiary Speech Must Be Protected.” The student’s electronic dictionary indicated that incendiary, obviously a key word, means “passionate.” In fact, referring to hate speech, incendiary means “infl ammatory,” “arousing strife,” or “inciting hostility.” Its connota-tion, or emotional value, is highly negative, whereas “passionate” is posi-tive. No wonder the student was confused!

Dictionary Features

A traditional print dictionary can provide the curious reader with a wealth of information beyond spellings and defi nitions. We can only scratch the surface in this introduction, but it would be a good idea to read through your dictionary’s introductory pages and to become acquainted with its



myriad features, particularly the way the dictionary arranges multiple defi nitions.

Order of Defi nitions

You may have been taught that the fi rst defi nition is probably the one you want. This is bad advice, especially because some dictionaries orga-nize their defi nitions historically rather than by frequency of meaning. In the Random House Webster’s College Dictionary and American Heritage Dictionary , the most common meanings generally come before those that are encountered less frequently. However, the Merriam- Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary and Webster’s New World Dictionary typically order the senses historically.

Choosing the Right Defi nition

Students often complain, with good reason, that the dictionary lists so many defi nitions it’s hard to fi gure out which is the best one. Unfortunately, there is no easy remedy for this complaint, but here are a few suggestions:

• Know which system your dictionary uses to organize its defi nitions. • Study the context of the sentence or paragraph you are reading to see

the word’s part of speech. If the word can be both a noun and a verb, go straight to the appropriate defi nitions and ignore other possibilities.

• Substitute the defi nition you chose in the sentence to see if it makes sense. • If you are unsure about which defi nition works best, ask your instructor

for help. • Realize that sometimes a word may straddle two defi nitions.

Here the opening sentences of Albert Camus’s essay “Refl ections on the Guillotine.” (So infl uential was this essay when it was published in 1960 that the French government was persuaded to ban capital punishment.)

Shortly before the war of 1914, an assassin whose crime was particularly repulsive (he had slaughtered a family of farmers, including the children) was condemned to death in Algiers. He was a farm worker who had killed in a sort of bloodthirsty frenzy but had aggravated his case by robbing his vic-tims. The affair created a great stir. It was generally thought that decapitation was too mild a punishment for such a monster.

Which of these two dictionary defi nitions best fi ts the way Camus uses aggravated ?

1. To make worse or more troublesome. 2. To rouse to exasperation or anger.



Only the fi rst defi nition works. You can substitute “to make worse” for the original word. “Had roused his case to exasperation or anger” makes no sense. Even seemingly easy words can cause diffi culty, as this example from Rosalie Pedalino Porter’s book Forked Tongue: The Politics of Bilingual Education illustrates:

My family was poor, so the fi rst necessity was for us to gain the economic means to survive. We children did not enjoy the middle-class luxury of a choice of schooling or careers.

Which of these two defi nitions for enjoy from The American Heritage Dictionary is right for this context?

1. To receive pleasure or satisfaction from. 2. To have the use or benefi t of.

Number 2 is the better choice: Since her family was poor, they could not have the benefi t of choices available to middle-class families.

Parts of Speech

A knowledge of grammar helps when you look up unfamiliar words, because many words in English fall into more than one grammatical category (part of speech). The dictionary labels parts of speech using abbreviations (n. = noun; v. = verb; adj. = adjective; and so on).

Practice Exercise 1

The word subject is one example of a word that crosses over grammatical lines. Here are a few defi nitions for the word subject from the American Heritage Dictionary . Notice that the noun and adjective forms accent the fi rst syllable, while the verb form accents the second.

subject adjective (sub jikt). 1 . Being in a position or in circumstances that place one under the power or authority of another, or others. 2. Prone, disposed: a child who is subject to colds. 3. Contingent or dependent: a vacation subject to changing weather. noun 4. One who is under the rule of another or others, especially one who owes allegiance to a government or ruler. 5. One concern-ing which something is said or done: a subject of gossip. 6. A course or area of study: Math is her best subject. 7. Grammar. The noun, noun phrase, or pronoun in a sentence that describes the doer of the action. verb (sub jekt) 8. To cause to experience: subjected to extreme weather 9. To subjugate, subdue.

Write the defi nition number and part of speech for each use of subject in these six sentences.

1. Barack Obama spoke at length on the subject of poverty and commu-nity organizations.



2. Queen Elizabeth greeted her subjects with a cheery wave from the window of Buckingham Palace.

3. Subject to the superior force of the invading army, the troops surren-dered unconditionally.

4. The crowd on the opening night of baseball season was subjected to the singer’s offkey version of the national anthem.

5. Jason’s plans are subject to change: If he doesn’t get into law school, he plans to join the Peace Corps.

6. The subject of the sentence must agree in number with the verb.

Using Context Clues

Although a good dictionary is indispensable, it is unrealistic to think that you must look up every unfamiliar word you come across. If you are unable to fi gure out a word’s meaning by analyzing its word parts, the context —the way the word is used in its particular setting—may yield a reasonably accurate meaning. Relying on context clues is not a substitute for looking up exact meanings in the dictionary, nor will every sentence with unfamiliar words necessarily provide you with a clue. But if one is there, a clue is a useful shortcut toward effi cient reading, especially when the word is not absolutely crucial to your understanding the text.

Synonyms

The most frequently used context clue is a synonym, a word or phrase similar in meaning to the unfamiliar word. Although the synonym may not have the exact meaning, it may be close enough to give you an ap-proximate defi nition.

When the class bully gets sent to the principal’s offi ce, when an-other corporate executive is found guilty of committing fraud and is sent to jail, when a fellow student whom we don’t like is caught cheating—we may experience schadenfreude , the feeling of taking guilty pleasure in another’s misfortunes.

In this case, the writer defi nes schadenfreude for you, making the sentence easy to read. Consider this example:

Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs put together the prototype for the original Apple computer in a Cupertino, California, garage.

Prototype most likely means

(a) basic design.

(b) the fi rst working model.

(c) a knock-off or cheap imitation.

(d) the fi nal product.

Circle the word that provides the synonym clue.



Antonyms

When a sentence suggests a contrast or a contradiction, the context clue may be in the form of an antonym , a word or phrase that means the op-posite of the word in question. If you know the antonym, then you may be able to fi gure out the unfamiliar word. For example:

The demonstration turned ugly late in the day, with protestors throwing rocks and bottles at the police, but the mayhem fi nally died down and order was restored by nightfall.

Since it is obviously being contrasted with “order,” a word with which you are probably familiar, mayhem means the opposite, “a state of violent disorder.” Here is another example:

A well-known writer was most upset when he learned that his publisher planned to release his new novel, which contained profanity and steamy sex scenes, in an expurgated version. Instead, he canceled the contract and found a company that would publish the book without removing the objectionable parts.

Expurgated most likely means

(a) thoroughly revised.

(b) having offensive material removed.

(c) simplifi ed, made easier to understand.

(d) made more concise.

Circle the phrase that serves as the antonym clue.

Examples and Illustrations

The meaning of an unfamiliar word may be suggested by nearby exam-ples and illustrations. In this case, no single word or phrase implies the defi nition, but taken together, the examples help us infer the meaning. Try this sentence:

Joseph Smith, Jr., the religious leader and founder of the Church of the Latter Day Saints, received little formal schooling. But he read a lot on his own, and like most autodidacts , he was concerned with the big questions that his reading awakened in his mind.

From the passage as a whole, you can probably determine that an autodidact is a person who is self-taught. Also the prefi x auto- always means “self.” Now try this one:

Nothing is more annoying than not being able to fi nd a pen when you want to write down a telephone message or make a grocery



list. No matter how many times I put new pens in the cup by the phone, they always disappear. It’s as if they just walk away. This dearth of pens is just one of the many annoyances of sharing an apartment with three roommates.

Dearth (pronounced to rhyme with “earth”) most likely means

(a) overabundance.

(b) obsession.

(c) complaint.

(d) scarce supply.

The situation the writer describes and the examples of disappearing pens suggest that the best defi nition is (d).

Opinion and Tone

This last kind of context clue is less direct and consequently more dif-fi cult to rely on. The writer’s tone —that is, his or her attitude toward the subject or the opinions the writer expresses—may give you a clue for an unfamiliar word. Study this example:

Some critics of mass media blame daytime television talk shows for their insidious infl uence on the viewing public. These programs parade their guests’ bizarre and deviant behaviors and create an unhealthy fascination for ever more grotesque revelations.

The obvious critical nature of this sentence suggests that insidious is some-thing bad, and indeed it is, since it means “progressing or spreading in a harmful way.” Consider one last example:

E. D. Hirsch, Jr., a well known educational consultant, argues that children are simply not acquiring enough knowledge in the elementary grades, especially in inner city schools. Failure to build knowledge contributes greatly to the inequity between the rich and poor. Unless this neglect of knowledge is addressed soon, Hirsch concludes that we can’t expect children’s test scores in reading and math to increase much.

Inequity most likely means

(a) competition.

(b) balance.

(c) inequality.

(d) misunderstanding.



Practice Exercise 2

Now try your hand at using context clues to determine the meaning of words in some selected passages. Read each passage and study the context. If possible, try to break each italicized word down into its component parts. Choose the defi nition that best fi ts the meaning of the word. This passage is reprinted from Utne , the magazine devoted to material from the alternative press.

According to anthropologists , money was probably fi rst used not in trade but as a convenient substitute for sacrifi cial animals in religious ceremonies and for the paying of tribute to overlords. Early money could be anything from stones to shells to nails. One particularly important form of money, coins made of a precious metal, originated in the early sixth century B.C.E. in Asia Minor (today’s Turkey) and spread quickly throughout the ancient world. Soon, laws mandated that coins had to contain a certain percentage of gold or silver by weight, and the odd idea that the value of money was “rooted” in the “natural” value of precious metals was established. These metals were valu-able mainly because they were shiny and rare. Nobel-winning economist Milton Friedman, the godfather of today’s right-wing libertarians, explores the paradox of money in the Encyclopedia Britannica (1985 edition). The real reason money works, he notes, is that people accept it in place of goods. Why? “Because they know others will. The pieces of paper are valuable because everyone thinks they are.”

Jon Spayde, “Making Friends with Your Finances,” Utne

1. Anthropologists most likely study(a) money (b) human cultures (c) religion (d) trade

2. In the fourth sentence, mandated probably means(a) established, set up (b) allowed, permitted (c) challenged, defi ed (d) required, ordered

3. According to Milton Friedman, our concept of money involves a paradox , in other words(a) a seeming contradiction (b) something mysterious (c) an impossibility (d) something irrational that needs to be changed

Practice Exercise 3

This passage concerns the origin of the classic children’s book Charlotte’s Web by E. B. White published in 1952. See if you can fi gure out the meaning of the three italicized words using context clues. In the fi rst space write your



defi nition for each word. Then look them up and in the second space write the dictionary defi nition. See how close you were to the dictionary meaning.

“Charlotte was a story of a friendship, life, death, salvation,” wrote E. B. White. His creation, a brown spider who taught the pig Wilbur the meaning of life, has become one of the most beloved of all children’s books. White found his source on the grounds of this own home in Brooklin, Maine, where he moved in 1928. He had been living in New York and working at The New Yorker , but he yearned for life outside the confi nes of a great urban environment. Brooklin, halfway up the coast of Maine, provided him with the setting and surroundings he needed to write and to live a good life. There he had some animals: some sheep, some geese, and a young pig named Wilbur. As he later noted, an old rat and a spider arrived uninvited. He had been mulling over a new book about animals aimed at children. One day, while headed through the orchard to feed Wilbur, he realized that a spider he had noticed in his barn might provide him with his story. He studied her for about a year, watching her spin her web and catch fl ies and even bear young. And he read any book he could fi nd about spiders, a species he had never much cared for but, after close inspection, found he liked very much. He named the live spider Charlotte, fi nding her to have a precise, disciplined New England-like air about her, and she soon inhabited his book. White told his pub-lisher that his spider would not appeal to those looking for a Disney version of animals. Life is stark in nature; animals eat each other, and they die, as Charlotte did. But White cared deeply for her, and for all the animals he came to see and know about his place, in the essential nature of their animal life. Anthropomor-phizing Charlotte would not have produced the real creature we have come to love. (The book’s illustrator, Garth Williams, originally drew Charlotte as a spider with a woman’s face, a move White quickly rejected. He sent Williams to various spider guides, especially pointing out the species Aranea cavatica as much more suitable, and much less Disneyfi ed.)

André Bernard, “Charlotte,” Madame Bovary, C’est Moi!

1. Confi nes Your defi nition

Dictionary defi nition 2. mulling over

Your defi nition

Dictionary defi nition 3. Anthropomorphizing

Your defi nition

Dictionary defi nition



ANNOTATING—READING WITH A PENCIL IN YOUR HAND

Let us illustrate a crucial skill—annotating. To annotate means to write brief notations in the margins, specifi cally, writing questions to raise in class, noting important points, and circling unfamiliar words. If you have trouble concentrating or if you are easily distracted as you read by the passing world around you, reading with a pencil in your hand will do wonders to help you comprehend better, maintain focus, and stay on track. Reprinted here are the fi rst two paragraphs from an essay by surgeon-writer Richard Selzer, “An Absence of Windows.” The passage is a little diffi cult, but do not be discouraged if you don’t completely understand it after the fi rst reading. That’s what the annotations are for—to help you make sense of it. Think about these questions fi rst:

• What do you envision when you think of a hospital operating room? • What is the likely source of that image? • Have you ever seen the inside of an actual operating room? • What is your general impression of surgeons? Where does it come

from?

Now read the passage. Then read it again, this time paying attention to the marginal annotations and to the circled words, which might not be familiar.

Critical Reading Exercise

Here are four popular word-of-the-day websites. Spend a few minutes examining each one. Which site would be most helpful to you as a way of improving your reading vocabulary? Some things to consider are ease of use, appropriate level of vocabulary words offered, and the quality of information provided for each word.

dictionary.com dictionary.reference.com/ credulous wordoftheday/

Merriam-Webster’s www.m-w.com/cgi-bin/ euphemism mwwod.pl

Yahoo word education.yahoo.com/ solace of the Day college/word/ yourDictionary.com www.yourdictionary.com/ jetsam



Not long ago, operating rooms had windows. It was a boon and a blessing in spite of the occasional fl y that managed to strain through the screens and threaten our very sterility. For the adventurous insect drawn to such a ravish-ing spectacle, a quick swat and, Presto! The door to the next world sprang open. But for us who battled on, there was the benediction of the sky, the applause and reproach of thunder. A Divine consultation crackled in on the lightning! And at night, in Emergency, there was the pomp , the longevity of the stars to defl ate a surgeon’s ego. It did no patient a disservice to have Heaven looking over his doctor’s shoulder. I very much fear that, having bricked up our windows, we have lost more than the breeze; we have severed a celestial connection.

Part of my surgical training was spent in a rural hospital in eastern Connecticut. The building was situated on the slope of a modest hill. Behind it, cows grazed in a pasture. The operating theater occupied the fourth, the ultimate fl oor, wherefrom huge windows looked down upon the scene. To glance up from our work and see the lovely cattle about theirs, calmed the frenzy of the most temperamental of prima donnas . Intuition tells me that our patients had fewer wound infections and made speedier recoveries than those operated upon in the airless sealed boxes where now we strive. Certainly the surgeons were of a gentler stripe.

What did you understand clearly? What didn’t you understand? To what extent is your lack of understanding a matter of unfamiliar vocabulary? To what extent is it because of Selzer’s style? Write two or three questions that entered your mind while you were reading the passage.

Next, let’s defi ne the circled words, which might cause readers some dif-fi culty.

Paragraph 1

boon a benefi t benediction a blessing reproach an expression of disapproval, blame pomp a dignifi ed or magnifi cent display

(The hymn played at graduations is called “Pomp and Circumstance.”)

celestial pertaining to the sky and the heavens

What’s the benefi t of windows in operating rooms? What’s a benediction? Why does he mention thunder? Why would windows defl ate a surgeon’s ego?

Why would watching cattle graze help surgeons?



Paragraph 2

temperamental describing one who is moody, irritable, or unpredictable

prima donna a temperamental, conceited person (from Italian, the female lead in an opera)

Read the passage a third time, this time connecting the defi nitions above to the circled words. Now that you have laid the foundation, answer these critical thinking questions.

1. What seems to be Selzer’s general opinion of surgeons? How can you tell?

2. Is Selzer being literal or imaginative in this phrase—“the benedic-tion of the sky, the applause and reproach of thunder”?

3. What does Selzer mean in paragraph 1 when he refers to the “lon-gevity of the stars”?

4. Who benefi ted when operating rooms had windows?

5. What evidence does Selzer offer to support the idea that patients had “fewer wound infections and made speedier recoveries” when surgeons could look out and see the world?

6. Ultimately, what is Selzer really concerned about with the pres-ent state of operating rooms, which he describes as “airless sealed boxes”?



Finally, write a sentence or two in your own words stating Selzer’s main point.

This exercise illustrates the analytical method employed in this text-book. Throughout the course, you will be asked to read and annotate passages—longer ones than this—using these techniques. As you can see from this exercise, critical analysis and a thorough comprehension on this level are possible only by reading carefully, by annotating, and by looking up unfamiliar words. Skimming through a passage allows you to get its drift but not a full understanding.

WRITING PARAPHRASES

To paraphrase means to restate a writer’s ideas in your own words. Paraphrase also lies at the heart of summarizing, which is taken up in the next section. I cannot stress how crucial these two skills are. Although paraphrasing and summarizing are writing skills, they are closely wedded to reading and must be mastered. The ability to read a passage and to say what it is about in your own words and to condense the central meaning into a few words will serve you well in your aca-demic and work life. Your reading instructor may ask you to write paraphrases of short pas-sages. In your English composition classes, you will be assigned papers to write, often based on your careful reading and analysis of one or more readings—essays, short stories, articles, abstracts, even entire books. In your other college classes, you will be asked to write research papers, requiring you to incorporate ideas of other writers in support of your thesis. This means, of course, that you both must understand the ideas accurately and be able to explain them in your own words, using proper citation. 4 Whatever the assignment, writing a paraphrase is an excellent way to check the accuracy of your comprehension.

4To copy the material and pass it off as your own is plagiarism, a serious offense that can warrant an F in the course. Even when you paraphrase a writer’s ideas in a research paper, you still have to document it—meaning that you must cite the author, the source, and all other relevant information.



To demonstrate paraphrasing, fi rst read this excerpt from Peter Bernstein’s book The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession :

Over the centuries, gold has stirred the passions for power and glory, for beauty, for security, and even for immortality. Gold has been an icon for greed, a vehicle for vanity, and a potent constraint as a monetary standard. No other object has commanded so much veneration over so long a period of time. (54 words)

Now study this sample paraphrase that a student wrote. Notice that it is somewhat longer than the original passage, which is perfectly acceptable.

The desire for glory, power, beauty, fi nancial protection, even the de-sire to live forever—gold has fueled the human passion for all of these throughout history. We use gold as the traditional representation of greed, gold feeds our sense of self-worth and pride, and it has been used as a way to measure the value of money. There isn’t another substance that has been as revered as much as gold has. (71 words)

A couple of remarks: First, the paraphrase preserves the meaning and fl avor of the original, it does not introduce new information or the stu-dent’s opinion, nor has anything important been omitted. Finally, the student did not go to silly extremes in fi nding synonyms. For example, she called “gold” gold rather than using a wordy phrase like “a soft pre-cious yellow metal.”

Practice Exercise 4

Here is an excerpt from an article called “Verbicide” (another excerpt from this article appears in an exercise at the end of Chapter 2). The writer, David Orr, argues in the article that English is experiencing a decline in what he calls “working vocabulary.” In this excerpt Orr offers one reason to explain this decline. Write your paraphrase in the spaces following the passage.

Language refl ects the range and depth of our experience; and our experience of the world is being impoverished to the extent that it is rendered artifi cial

Techniques for Paraphrasing

1. Use synonyms for key words without changing the meaning. 2. Change the order of ideas within the original sentence. 3. Omit unimportant details or excess verbiage. 4. Combine ideas and sentences. 5. Maintain the same tone and style as the original passage.

Here are fi ve suggestions for writing paraphrases, each of which is illustrated below.



and prepackaged. Most of us no longer have the experience of skilled physical work on farms or in forests. Consequently, as our reality becomes increasingly artifi cial, words and metaphor based on intimate knowledge of soils, plants, trees, animals, landscapes, rivers, and oceans have declined. . . . We’ve be-come a nation of television watchers and Internet browsers, and it shows in the way we talk and what we talk about. More and more we speak as if we are spectators of life, not active participants, moral agents, or engaged citizens. (117 words)

Instruction in writing summaries follows the Practice Essay at the end of the chapter exercises, which will give you additional practice in the skills discussed thus far—vocabulary and context clues, annotating, and paraphrasing.

CHAPTER EXERCISES

1 The Bear Paw Mountains, a low-slung range south of Chinook, Montana, get their name from an Indian tale of a hunter who ventures into a land of giant bears in order to feed his starving family. 2 When he kills a deer, an an-gry bear grabs him. 3 In a flash, the Creator severs the bear’s paw. 4 Another version tells of an Indian girl who comes to bathe in a virginal lake. 5 A bear bewitched by her beauty reaches out, and the Creator saves her in the same way. 6 The naming of these mountains, like all Indian naming, is poetically exact. 7 From the High Plains, they appear magically inviting, and also re-markably like the just severed paw of a giant bear, its knuckles rippling across the horizon.

Mark Stevens, “Chief Joseph’s Revenge,” The New Yorker

Selection 1



A. Vocabulary

Each of these vocabulary words from the selection is followed by two or more dictionary defi nitions. Choose the best defi nition for the way the word is used in the context.

1. a hunter who ventures into a land of giant bears(a) to expose to danger or risk (b) to brave the dangers of (c) to express at the risk of criticism

2. the Creator severs the bear’s paw(a) to keep apart; divide or separate (b) to break up, dissolve (c) to cut off a part from a whole

3. to bathe in a virginal lake(a) chaste, as describing a virgin (b) untouched, fresh

4. a bear bewitched by her beauty(a) to cast a spell over (b) to captivate completely, entrance

B. Annotating

To annotate Stevens’s paragraph, what one idea would you pull out as being the most important?

C. Paraphrasing

Write a paraphrase of these two sentences from the paragraph:

1. In a fl ash, the Creator severs the bear’s paw.

2. The naming of these mountains, like all Indian naming, is poetically exact.

A. Vocabulary

1. b 2. c 3. b 4. b

B. Annotating

The naming of these mountains, like all Indian naming, is poetically exact.

Answers for Selection 1



C. Paraphrasing

1. With lightning speed, the Creator cuts off the bear’s paw. 2. Indians named mountains and other natural features in a way that is

both poetic and realistic.

Each year children see forty thousand television commercials, most of which are for unhealthy foods. But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. Susan Linn, author of Consuming Kids, starkly describes how technological advances—such as the Internet and cell phones—are exploited to bypass parents and target children directly. Product placement (Coca-Cola merchandise on American Idol ), cross pro-motions and movie tie-ins ( Star Wars toy promotions at Burger King), brand licens-ing (Pop-Tarts boxes adorned with cartoon hero SpongeBob SquarePants), and marketing in schools all make television commercials seem tame by comparison.

Michele Simon, Appetite for Profi t

A. Vocabulary

Using a dictionary, write the part of speech for each of these italicized vocabulary words from the passage. Then write the defi nition that best fi ts the context.

1. exploited to bypass parents 2. target children directly 3. boxes adorned with cartoon hero Spongebob 4. make television commercials look tame

B. Annotating

To annotate Simon’s paragraph, what one idea would you pull out as being the most important?

C. Paraphrasing

Write a paraphrase of the paragraph.

Selection 2



The author of this passage lived in Saudi Arabia for several years during the 1970s and 1980s. The subject is the structure and role of the family in Saudi Arabia. Bedouins, mentioned in the fi rst sentence, are nomadic desert dwellers in Saudi Arabia and other Middle Eastern countries.

Clustered in family or tribe, the Bedouins refuse to surrender to outside authority. Their support can be bought but their loyalty is anchored in the family. In the past, each desert family was alone, separated from the rest of society by the sparseness of the vegetation needed to support the animals on which their very lives depended. From this isolation in family units there developed over many centuries an intense feeling that an individual had no protection beyond that of the family. Of the various values the Bedouins have bestowed on modern Saudi Arabia, the primacy of the family is among the most important.

Saudis live in large extended families. It is one of their signifi cant differences from Western culture that, for the Saudis, the concept of individuality is absent. A Saudi sees himself in the context of his family and, to a lesser degree, the tribe.

His duty is never to himself but to the group. Within the family, there is a strong sense of patrilineal descent, for a man is considered to be a descendant only of his father and his paternal grandfather but never his mother or maternal grand-father. He belongs only to his father’s group, which claims his entire, undivided loyalty. This is why the most sought-after marriages are fi rst cousin marriages between children of brothers. By sharing the same grandfather, the all-important group solidarity is ensured.

There is within the family a rigid hierarchy made up of the male members of the family in descending order of age. The oldest male member decides what is in the best interests of the family and dictates the role each individual is to play in the group’s general goal. For the individual, this determines whom he marries, where he lives, whether he pursues an education, and what his occupation is. I never became accustomed to the answer I often got from young Saudis, male and female, to my question “Are you going abroad to study?” The response was, “I do not know. My father has not decided.”

This idea is anathema to Westerners steeped in the intense individualism of West-ern society. But to a Saudi, the absence of any independent choice is in no way perceived as doing damage to the individual. The docile acceptance of decisions made by the patriach results from the way the Saudi family perceives itself in rela-tion to the rest of the world. The world outside the family is viewed as an inimical place, where a family must be ready to defend itself even against its neighbor. In the last part of the twentieth century, even educated Saudis harbor a deep fear of the world outside the home. Well-to-do families live in houses clustered together in compounds that are walled off from the rest of the world. Modest homes and the new apartment houses are built with small windows that seem to shut out everyone but those admitted through the iron gate or locked metal door that stands in front of all Saudi dwellings. So insulated is the family that Saudi social

Selection 3



life is markedly different from that of other Middle Easterners. A pattern of social-izing among village women is absent. The men do frequent the coffee houses on occasion, but otherwise there is almost no social infrastructure for cultural reenforcement through festivals, dances, or drama. Socializing among Saudis is almost exclusively within the kinship group. As a result, without the support and approval of his family, a Saudi is lost. With no other alternative, a Saudi willingly pays the price for family support—the strict conformity to the group’s demands.

Sandra Mackey, The Saudis: Inside the Desert Kingdom

A. Vocabulary

Using context clues from the passage, write your defi nition for each italicized word. Then look up the word in the dictionary and write the defi nition in the second space. See how close your defi nition is to the one provided.

1. patrilineal Your defi nition Dictionary defi nition

2. hierarchy Your defi nition Dictionary defi nition

3. anathema Your defi nition Dictionary defi nition

4. docile Your defi nition Dictionary defi nition

5. patriarch Your defi nition Dictionary defi nition

6. inimical Your defi nition Dictionary defi nition

7. insulated Your defi nition Dictionary defi nition

8. frequent Your defi nition Dictionary defi nition



B. Annotating

Assume that you are writing an essay on the family structure in Saudi Arabia. Annotate the passage in the left margin, identifying the essential character-istics Mackey describes.

C. Paraphrasing

Paraphrase these two excerpts from the passage:

1. The idea is anathema to Westerners steeped in the intense individual-ism of Western society. But to a Saudi, the absence of any independent choice is in no way perceived as doing damage to the individual. (36 words)

2. A pattern of socializing among village women is absent. The men do frequent the coffee houses on occasion, but otherwise there is no social infrastructure for cultural reinforcement through festivals, dances, or drama. (33 words)

A summarizing exercise based on this passage can be found at the end of the chapter.



PRACTICE ESSAY

From Seabiscuit: An American Legend “How Jockeys Controlled Their Weight” Laura Hillenbrand

In the developed world, eating disorders—specifi cally anorexia and bulimia—have become a major health problem, especially for young women. It’s a complicated issue, with no simple causes or solutions. Although an eating disorder is usually an individual health problem, athletes (particularly female gymnasts and fi gure skaters) and ballet dancers are often pressured by their coaches and trainers to keep their weight abnormally low. Another culprit is the obsession in the United States with thinness evident in both the mass media and advertising. But jockeys must also watch their weight. This excerpt, which ex-plains the often absurd lengths to which jockeys went to keep their weight in check, is from Laura Hillenbrand’s best-selling 2001 book about the legendary racehorse Seabiscuit: An American Legend . The book intro-duces the reader to the world of Thoroughbred horse racing and examines

the social and cultural forces at work during the 1930s and the dark years of the Depression when America needed a diversion from its economic woes. Seabiscuit, an ungainly and not particularly attractive horse, represented one such diversion. He won race after race and astonished the nation with his incred-ible speeds. Since 1989 Laura Hillenbrand has been writing about Thoroughbred racing for Equus magazine. She has also published widely in other magazines, among them The Blood-Horse , Thoroughbred Times, The Backstretch, Turf , and Sport Digest . The genesis for the book was a 1998 article published in American Heritage , which won the Eclipse Award for Magazine Writing.

Preview Questions

1. What do you know about horse racing? Have you ever attended a horse race or watched one of the nation’s premier horse races on television (i.e., the Kentucky Derby, the Preakness, the Belmont Stakes)? What are some reasons that horse racing has been a popu-lar pastime for Americans?

2. Why must racing jockeys be small? What is a handicap, and how is it determined?

The fi rst paragraph has been annotated for you. Continue annotating in the left margin as you read the essay.

1 They called the scale “the Oracle,” and they lived in slavery to it. In the 1920s and 1930s, the imposts, or weights horses were assigned to carry in races, generally ranged from 83 pounds to 130 or more, depending on the rank of the horse and the importance of the race. A rider could be

jockeys were slaves to the scale



no more than 5 pounds over the assigned weight or he would be taken off the horse. Some trainers trimmed that leeway down to just a half pound. To make weight in anything but high-class stakes races, jockeys had to keep their weight to no more than 114 pounds. Riders competing in ordinary weekday events needed to whittle themselves down another 5 pounds or so, while those in the lowest echelons of the sport couldn’t weigh much more than 100. The lighter a rider was, the greater the num-ber of horses he could ride. “Some riders,” wrote Eddie Arcaro, 5 “will all but saw their legs off to get within the limit.”

2 A few riders were naturally tiny enough to make weight without dif-fi culty, and they earned the burning envy of every other jockey. Most of them were young teenagers whose growth spurts lay ahead of them. To ensure that they didn’t waste time and money training and support-ing boys who would eventually grow out of their trade, contract train-ers checked the foot size of every potential bug boy, 6 since a large foot is a fairly good sign of a coming growth spurt. Many also inspected the height and weight of a potential bug boy’s siblings. Trainer Woody Stephens, who began his racing career as a bug boy in the late 1920s, always felt he got lucky in this respect. In vetting him for the job, his trainer neglected to look at his sister, a local basketball phenom.

3 Virtually every adult rider, and most of the kids, naturally tended to weigh too much. Cheating, if you did it right, could help a little. One pudgy 140-pound rider earned a place in reinsman legend by fooling a profoundly myopic clerk of scales by skewing the readout to register him at 110. No one is exactly sure how he did it, but it is believed that either he positioned his feet on a nonregistering part of the scale or his valet stuck his whip under his seat and lifted up. He made it through an entire season before someone caught him.

4 Most jockeys took a more straightforward approach: the radical diet, con-sisting of six hundred calories a day. Red Pollard 7 went as long as a year eating nothing but eggs. Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons confessed that during his riding days a typical dinner consisted of a leaf or two of lettuce, and he would eat them only after placing them on a windowsill to dry the water out of them. Water, because of its weight, was the prime enemy, and jockeys went to absurd lengths to keep it out of their systems. Most drank virtually nothing. A common practice was to have jockey’s room valets open soda cans by puncturing the top with an ice pick, making it impossible to drink more than a few drops at a time. The sight and sound of water became a torment; Fitzsimmons habitually avoided areas

the lighter the wt. the more horses jockeys could ride

5Eddie Arcaro was a famous American jockey who won the Kentucky Derby fi ve times and the Triple Crown twice during his long career. 6A bug boy is an apprentice jockey who gets a weight allowance to compensate for his inexperience. 7Red Pollard and George Woolf (mentioned later in paragraph 5) both rode Seabiscuit. Sunny Jim Fitzsimmons was another well-known jockey in the late 1930s.

couldn’t be more than 5 lbs. over wt. assigned


of the barn where horses were being washed because the spectacle of fl owing water was agonizing.

5 But the weight maximums were so low that near fasting and water de-privation weren’t enough. Even what little water and calories the body had taken in had to be eliminated. Many riders were “heavers,” poking their fi ngers down their throats to vomit up their meals. Others chewed gum to trigger salivation; Tommy Luther could spit off as much as half a pound in a few hours. Then there were the sweating rituals, topped by “road work.” This practice, used by both Red Pollard and George Woolf, involved donning heavy underwear, zipping into a rubber suit, swad-dling in hooded winter gear and woolen horse blankets, then running around and around the track, preferably under a blistering summer sun. Stephens remembered seeing jockeys in full road-work attire gathering at a bowling alley, so lathered that sweat spouted from their shoes with each step. After road work, there were Turkish baths, where jockeys con-gregated for mornings of communal sweating. The desiccation practices of jockeys were lampooned by turf writer Joe H. Palmer in a column written on jockey Abelardo DeLara: “DeLara has to sweat off about two pounds a day to make weight. Last year, by his own estimate, he lost 600 pounds this way. Since he weighs about 110, it is a mere matter of arithmetic that he would be a bit more than 700 pounds if he hadn’t reduced so regularly.”

A. Comprehension

Choose the answer that best completes each statement. Do not refer to the selection while doing this exercise.

1. In the 1920s and 1930s. jockeys had to maintain a weight of no more than(a) 95 pounds. (b) 100 pounds. (c) 114 pounds. (d) 145 pounds.

2. Jockeys called the scales they had to weigh themselves on(a) “the Oracle.” (b) “the Career Breaker.” (c) “the Monster.” (d) “the Master.”

3. Horse trainers did not want to waste their time training bug boys (young apprentice jockeys) if eventually they would(a) grow bored with racing and drop out. (b) prove not to be winners. (c) grow to be too big to ride. (d) leave and sign on with another trainer.



4. Because it added weight to their bodies, most jockeys did everything they could to avoid(a) eating vegetables. (b) drinking alcohol. (c) eating bread or other carbohydrates. (d) drinking water.

5. To ensure that they would meet weight restrictions, many jockeys(a) performed exhausting workouts in the gym. (b) underwent various types of sweating rituals. (c) became anorexic. (d) lied about their weight or cheated.

B. Vocabulary

Look through the paragraphs listed below and fi nd a word that matches each defi nition. Refer to a dictionary if necessary.

1. reduce gradually [paragraph 1] 2. ranks, levels [1] 3. slang for a remarkable or outstanding person [2] 4. subjecting to a complete examination or evaluation [2] 5. near-sighted [3] 6. putting on an article of clothing [5] 7. made fun of [5] 8. removing moisture [5]

C. Structure and Meaning

Complete the following questions.

1. Why do you think that jockeys referred to the weight scale as “the Oracle”?

2. Why does Hillenbrand emphasize that jockeys ideally weigh no more than 100 pounds?

3. What is the most important point that should be annotated in paragraph 5?




4. Read the end of paragraph 5 again, where the turf writer Joe H. Palmer commented on the weight lost by the jockey Abelardo DeLara. What point was Palmer trying to make?

D. Questions for Discussion and Analysis

1. What might be the reason that racehorses carry imposts, or weights? What do these imposts have to do with the subject of this essay, jock-eys’ attempts to keep their weights at certain prescribed levels?

2. Why might teenage boys coming of age during the Depression have been attracted to horse racing?

Critical Reading Exercise

The headnote accompanying this selection alludes to the problem many athletes face: the necessity to control their weight. How seri-ous is the problem of anorexia and bulimia in the sports world? By doing a search of “eating disorders” and “athletes,” I located these three sites. Which does the best (most complete) job of present-ing factual information and examining the scope of the problem? Which seems the most authoritative?

The fi rst is a research paper titled “The Female Athlete Triad: Characteristics, Consequences, and Social Implications” written in 2000 for a biology course by Naomi Lin, a student at Bryn Mawr College. http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/biology/b103/f00/web3/lim3.html The second is a USA Today article dated February 5, 2006, by Nanci Hellmich titled “Athletes’ Hunger to Win Fuels Eating Disorders.” www.usatoday.com/news/health/2006-02-05-women-health-cover_x.htm The third is an anonymous article published on www.about.com titled “Study Finds Few College Athletes with Eating Disorders.” www.mentalhealth.about.com/cs/eat/a/athleteeat.htm

WRITING SUMMARIES

A colleague describes a summary as a distillation of ideas. As she put it, “We can reduce a large number of grapes into a very small but potent glass of wine. The grapes are still there, but in a different, more condensed and powerful form.” In other words, a summary is a condensed version of an



essay, article, or book; it presents the writer’s thesis, the supporting ideas, and the conclusion—in other words, only the important information. Writing summaries provides many intellectual benefi ts: A summary is a good measure of your reading and writing skills. Like a paraphrase, it requires that you understand a passage accurately. But summarizing goes beyond a paraphrase because the process forces you to weigh the rela-tive worth of ideas, deciding what is essential and what is nonessential, what to retain and what to omit. It forces you to discern the arrangement of ideas and requires you to restate the ideas concisely, accurately, and fairly, without intruding your own opinion or judgment or distorting the thinking. Finally, it helps avoid plagiarism (copying). Your ability to restate the main ideas of a passage in your own words is a true indicator of how well you understand it. How long should a summary be? Unless your instructor requires you to conform to a particular length, use this formula as a guide: A sum-mary should be roughly between 5 and 15 percent of the original. Some instructors ask that a summary be no more than a single typed page, double-spaced, or roughly 200 to 250 words. The Hillenbrand essay at the end of this chapter is relatively short, about 825 words, so your sum-mary should be between 50 and 125 words. One hundred words would be the perfect length.

Follow these suggestions to write an effective summary:

• Read through the passage at least twice so that you have a good under-standing of the content. Circle any unfamiliar words and look them up.

• Annotate it, noting main ideas and key supporting statements. Deter-mine where the piece breaks into sections.

• Transfer your annotations to a separate sheet of paper. Write the main point of each section (or of each paragraph, if the piece is short). Leave plenty of space between each point to make changes or to add material.

• Maintain the balance between main ideas and supporting details in the original. Include only the supporting details that best support the main points.

• Paraphrase the writer’s ideas as much as possible, but do not change key terms. For example, in writing a summary of “How Jockeys Controlled Their Weight,” it would not be plagiarizing to use words or phrases from the essay like “jockeys” or “assigned weights.” Don’t strain to fi nd synonyms for words that form the basis of the essay.

• Insert transitional words or phrases as necessary to show the relation-ship between ideas. (See Chapter 5 for a list of common transitions and their functions.)

• Prepare a fi nal draft by rewriting your sentences. Check to see that your summary is accurate and free of your own ideas and opinions. (Note, however, that many instructors assign a summary-response paper, in

How to Write a Summary



which you would be asked both to summarize an essay and then to evaluate it by explaining your objections, criticisms, or other observa-tions. In this case, your instructor is asking for your point of view. If you are unsure about an assignment, ask for clarifi cation.)

• Your summary’s fi rst sentence should include the author’s name and the essay title in the fi rst sentence as well as its main idea. Use the present verb tense throughout. If you use quotations, do so sparingly.

• Do a word count, making sure that your summary is the appropriate length. If it is too long, cut unnecessary verbiage or supporting examples.

Sample Summary—First Draft

Laura Hillenbrand’s essay, “How Jockeys Controlled Their Weight,” de-scribes the often absurd lengths that jockeys in the 1920s and 1930s went to to keep their weight within required limits. Jockeys were not allowed to weigh more than 5 pounds over the assigned weight; further, jockeys in high-stakes races could not weigh more than 114 pounds, while in less important races they couldn’t weigh more than 100 pounds. Naturally, a jockey who was light was able to ride more horses than a heavier one, which favored teenage jockeys who hadn’t reached their adult weight yet. Jockeys controlled their weight by eating very little (one jockey even dried the water on his lettuce leaves) and by severely limiting their water intake. Some jockeys vomited after eating, while others engaged in bizarre sweating rituals or congregated in Turkish baths, all with the purpose of keeping their riding weight within prescribed limits. (147 words)

Comment Because my fi rst draft was almost 50 words over my self-imposed limit of 100 words, some cutting was in order. After studying my draft, I decided that the second sentence could easily be condensed. I also tightened up the language (“eating very little” became “fasting”) and omitted a couple of little details. Even though I wanted to save the idea that one jockey went so far as to dry lettuce leaves on a windowsill, it had to go. The fi nal draft is just over 100 words.

Sample Summary—Final Draft

Laura Hillenbrand’s essay, “How Jockeys Controlled Their Weight,” de-scribes the often absurd lengths that jockeys in the 1920s and 1930s went to control their weight. Depending on the type of race, jockeys had to restrict their weight to between 100 and 114 pounds. Naturally,

OLC Purdue University’s website has one of the oldest and best Online Writing Laboratories in the nation. Its OWL offers students dozens of handouts on all the elements of writing an essay, including how to write a summary and how to avoid plagiarism. The address is http://owl.english.purdue.edu/ Further information on the difference between quoting, paraphrasing, and sum-marizing is available at http://owl.english.purdue.edu/handouts/ research/r_quotprsum.html



a jockey who was light could ride more horses than a heavier one, so teenage boys were especially envied because they had not yet reached their adult weight. Jockeys lost weight by fasting and by avoiding water. Some jockeys vomited after eating, while others engaged in elaborate sweating rituals and congregated at Turkish baths for “communal sweat-ing.” (101 words)

The One-Sentence Summary

Writing a one-sentence summary of an essay, article, or other sustained piece of writing is an especially good way to check your comprehension of the writer’s main point. Distilling a lengthy discussion to a single sen-tence is useful outside of college in the real world of meetings, proposals, and strategy sessions. Here is a one-sentence summary of Hillenbrand’s essay:

During the 1920s and 1930s jockeys often went to extreme lengths to keep their weight within prescribed limits—by fasting, avoiding water, and engaging in sweating rituals.

Practice Exercise 5

Return to Selection 3 on page 33 and summarize Sandra Mackey’s passage on the structure of the Saudi family. Since the original passage is about 600 words long, your summary should be between 60 and 100 words.

Now write a one-sentence summary of the passage.


reading for understanding: practice in basic comprehension

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