TEST: How fast do you read in these modes?

When we were discussing Crystal, the topic of how we read came up in class. There was a little debate on whether we look at letters, words, and how fast we recognize word and sentence meaning.


I mentioned that there was an online tool that assesses reading speed and also demonstrates how we can also comprehend reading when words "flash" online.


I couldn't find one site that does both things, but if you have 3 minutes and want to test yourself, check this out.


1.) Go to http://mindbluff.com/askread.htm

It will give you a passage and time how much you read in one minute. Test yourself and note your reading speed.



2.) Go to http://www.spreeder.com/ and paste any text into the box. You can use the JFK speech from mindbluff or I have attached the beginning of Dickens' David Copperfield below.



3.) Go to the "settings" tab in the bottom of the text box and set it to your "reading speed" established by the first test on mindbluff. Hit play and the words will start flashing. Seems slower than your reading speed, doesn't it? You can experiment with changing the speed-- even at very high speeds (500+) you might find that you have decent comprehension and that blinking your eyes has no effect on understanding the words.




SAMPLE TEXT FOR SPREEDER:

Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages must show. To begin my life with the beginning of my life, I record that I was born (as I have been informed and believe) on a Friday, at twelve o’clock at night. It was remarked that the clock began to strike, and I began to cry, simultaneously.


In consideration of the day and hour of my birth, it was declared by the nurse, and by some sage women in the neighbourhood who had taken a lively interest in me several months before there was any possibility of our becoming personally acquainted, first, that I was destined to be unlucky in life; and secondly, that I was privileged to see ghosts and spirits; both these gifts inevitably attaching, as they believed, to all unlucky infants of either gender, born towards the small hours on a Friday night.


I need say nothing here, on the first head, because nothing can show better than my history whether that prediction was verified or falsified by the result. On the second branch of the question, I will only remark, that unless I ran through that part of my inheritance while I was still a baby, I have not come into it yet. But I do not at all complain of having been kept out of this property; and if anybody else should be in the present enjoyment of it, he is heartily welcome to keep it.


I was born with a caul, which was advertised for sale, in the newspapers, at the low price of fifteen guineas. Whether sea-going people were short of money about that time, or were short of faith and preferred cork jackets, I don’t know; all I know is, that there was but one solitary bidding, and that was from an attorney connected with the bill-broking business, who offered two pounds in cash, and the balance in sherry, but declined to be guaranteed from drowning on any higher bargain. Consequently the advertisement was withdrawn at a dead loss—for as to sherry, my poor dear mother’s own sherry was in the market then—and ten years afterwards the caul was put up in a raffle down in our part of the country, to fifty members at half-a-crown a head, the winner to spend five shillings. I was present myself, and I remember to have felt quite uncomfortable and confused at a part of myself being disposed of in that way. The caul was won, I recollect, by an old lady with a hand-basket, who, very reluctantly, produced from it the stipulated five shillings, all in halfpence, and twopence halfpenny short—as it took an immense time and a great waste of arithmetic to endeavour without any effect to prove to her. It is a fact which will be long remembered as remarkable down there, that she was never drowned, but died triumphantly in bed, at ninety-two. I have understood that it was, to the last, her proudest boast, that she never had been on the water in her life, except upon a bridge; and that over her tea (to which she was extremely partial) she, to the last, expressed her indignation at the impiety of mariners and others, who had the presumption to go “meandering” about the world.