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Skills focus
Scan Reading
Sometimes when reading we know the kind of information we are looking for. For example, in
question 1, page 18, you know you have to look for a number; in question 3, you need to look for
London or 1989 , and the answer will be close by. We don t need to read to find this
information, rather, our eyes search across, up, down, and around the text. This skill is called
scanning . Think about how you look up a word in a dictionary. You scan the page to find the
word you are looking for, you don t read the page. The most important thing about scanning is
speed. We do it quickly.
Practice 1
Answer questions 1-4 as quickly as possible using the text below. Use your watch to time yourself.
It should take you 1 minute.
1 How much of the human body is water?
2 How much water does the average person use for bathing?
3 How many people die per day from diseases related to dirty water?
4 How many litres of water does it take to make one pair of leather shoes?
The human body is about 65 per cent water. If you stopped drinking water (or drinks and food containing water) you would die within three or four days. But the water you drink must be clean.
Each day an average person uses the following amounts of water:
Toilet flushing 35 litres
Cooking and drinking 30 litres
Bathing 30 litres
Using a shower 12-20 litres
The average daily total per person is 140 litres. The average family uses 480 litres of water a day.
Water can carry diseases. According to a recent report published by the united Nations, every day
throughout the world about 25,000 people die from diseases related to dirty water.
It takes 31,600 litres of water to make one tone of steel. It takes 53 litres of water to make one pair
of leather shoes and 9 litres of water to make every comic that you read.
Key:1 65% 2 30 litres 3 25000 4 53 litres
Practice 2
Before you answer the following questions, decide what kind of answer, or which words from
the question, you are looking for. Then answer the question. You have 2 minutes.
1 Give two examples of cities which have no sewerage.
2 Where is half of household income spent on water?
3 What must Lagos inhabitants do on sanitation day ?
4 Where do more than 60% of Third World people live?
5 In the 1970s, how many people had no proper means of waste disposal?
Meanwhile, people in the Third World can only envy the levels of health risk faced by those of us
who can turn on a tap or flush a toilet. Most cities in Africa and many in Asia-Dakar, Kinshasa
and Chittagong, for example, gullies and ditches are where most human excrement and household
waste end up.
People draw their drinking water from a standpipe which only operates for a few hours each day.
Women still wash clothes and bathe their children in a muddy stream. In Nairobi, Jakarta,
Bangkok and elsewhere, families are forced to purchase water from a vendor, paying ten times the
rate charged to houses with mains connections (in Khartoum it is 18 times more expensive). In
some parts of Sudan, half of household income is spent on water.
As city populations rapidly expand, water and sanitation services are put under pressures
unimaginable to those who build them. But at least fear of epidemic-repeating the terrible ravages
of cholera in nineteenth-century Europe-encourages action in city halls. Lagos, for example, used
to be a watchword for urban filth. Now there is a monthly sanitation day on which moving
around the city is banned: everyone must pick up a shovel and clean their neighbourhood.
But until very recently, the sanitary environment inhabited by more than 60 per cent of Third
World people-the countryside-was left to take care of itself. The woman carrying her container to
the well, washing her laundry in the stream, leaving her toddlers to squat in the compound, had
never seen a pipeline nor a drain; no faucet graced her village square, let alone her own backyard.
At the end of the 1970s, 1.2 billion people in the Third World were without a safe supply of
drinking water and 1.6 billion without any proper means of waste disposal.
Key: 1 Any two of Dakar, Kinshasa and Chittagong
2 Some parts of Sudan
3 Clean their neighbourhood
4 In the countryside
5 1.6 billion people
Skills Focus
Skim reading
Getting the main ides of a text or paragraph quickly is called skim reading. There are different
ways of skim reading:
i If you re very short of time or reading, for example, a newspaper article, you might just read the
heading and the first sentence of each paragraph. This is often enough to give you a fair idea of the
content.
ii For texts that you have to unde | 
