go? If he does go, he will surely spread the disease to a good many innocent boys and girls. It is necessary to be honest and unselfish, and to observe health regulations. If a contagious disease does appear in our home, we must see to it that the case is strictly quarantined from other members of the family and that all the dishes, clothes, bedclothes, and everything else used by the patient are carefully disinfected.

HUNTER AND WHITMAN - Civic Science in the Community

The fly nuisance is largely in the hands of the community. If people wish a town to be free from flies, they can have it so, and if they wish to have flies as a nuisance, all they have to do is to let the flies breed freely. It ought to be the work of every boy and girl who reads these paragraphs to arouse public sentiment in his, or her, community; so that every individual who has been selfish enough to allow his manure heap to become a menace to the health of the community will realize that he is not doing a fair thing to the rest of the community. By carrying out the sanitary laws made for the benefit of the community, the fly menace can be prevented.

HUNTER AND WHITMAN

Civic Science in the Community

EXERCISES

A. Select from your history, hygiene, or civics text, or from some magazine two paragraphs. Read them carefully and then write the topic sentence of each.

B. Write a letter to a pupil in the seventh grade of some town or city, telling this pupil about a book you have read. Tell some particular thing in the book that struck you. Don't say, "I liked this book because it was interesting," but tell what the book is about and what makes it interesting. Of course, in a letter you will not have time to write the story of the book. Look over your letter for mistakes and let your teacher see it. Rewrite your letter, correcting your

mistakes, and then mail it.

C. Write a letter to your mother or to your father, telling what difficulties you have in studying. If you have no room in which to study alone, ask that you may have a place where you can study quietly.

Always use have, has, had, or some other helper before done.

EXERCISES

A. Fill each blank in the following sentences with the correct form, did or done. Read the complete sentence aloud.

5. When you have

6. If he had 7. You

the first half you may stop for the day. what I suggested, he would not have had trouble. what I should have

B. Answer the following questions with complete sentences. Use the correct form, did or done, in your answers. Give your answers aloud.

1. Have you done what I asked you?

2. Did she do the best thing possible?

3. What have you done about getting a position?

4. Did she do what you told her?

5. When did you do your work?

6. Where was the printing done?

7. Have they done the last piece of work I gave them?

Purpose in Reading. What do we do when we read? That depends on why we are reading, or, in other words, on our purpose in reading. For example, a person picks up the morning paper and glances over the headlines to see what has happened in the world since yesterday. If he sees "Five Unions Combine in Clothing Fight," he may pass over that column if he has no interest in the clothing-workers' strike; but if he is an employer of clothing workers, or a clothing worker himself, or if he is interested in the improvement of the conditions of labor in general, he will probably read what the latest developments are.

He may see this head: "Premier To Tell Decision on Ireland To-day." If he is interested in the Irish question this heading will attract his attention; but if he notices that it is not an account of what has happened, but merely a forecast of what may happen, he may pass it over and wait till to-morrow to read how the matter was settled.

DIFFERENT RATES OF READING

105

There will, of course, be many "stories" in the newspaper that he will not read. No intelligent person would think of reading all the newspaper. The drift of his interests will determine what kind of items he will pick out. If he is interested in sports, he will naturally turn to the sporting section and read the world's records in sports. If he cares for the theater, he will read the theatrical page. If he has money invested in stocks, he will turn to the market quotations to see whether his stocks have advanced or fallen, and so on. A skillful reader learns to glean in thirty minutes from the daily paper, even a city paper of twenty to thirtytwo pages, what is of value to him. There is no greater waste of time than slow, careful reading of a newspaper.

Different Rates of Reading. Let us study our method of reading the newspaper to see how we read the different articles we select. The newspaper very skillfully sums up the substance of its "stories" in the heading and the first few paragraphs. Details to amplify the main thought are given in the latter part of the article, so that we may read as far as we like or are interested.

To go back to the account of the garment-workers' strike, if a person is interested as a worker, he may read the entire article; but if he has merely a general interest, he will quickly run through the column and pick out the more important points. Again, a stock investor will not read every market quotation in the whole table, unless he is also a broker. He will select only the stocks in which he is interested. reading an editorial, however, the method is different. Here the writer has a train of thought to develop through a series of paragraphs. To get his thought we must read the entire article to see how his main idea stands out in relation to the subordinate ideas that contribute to it.

In

Purpose Determines What and How We Read. It is very plain, then, that a person's purpose in reading determines both what he reads and how he reads. It determines what he reads by leading him to select those subjects that bear on his interests; and it determines how he reads by allowing him to pass over quickly the parts not important for his purpose. From this account of how a person reads we can see readily that the rate of reading must vary for different kinds of reading. Sometimes it is a virtue to read very rapidly and, it may be, to skip whole pages. At other times it is necessary to read carefully and even slowly to make sure that no essential point has been missed. Therefore the whole question of the rate of reading is bound up in the larger one of what purpose one has in reading.

Reading Word Groups. The rate of reading may generally be increased by keeping the mind alert and concentrated on the subject in hand. Sometimes pupils and even adult readers take entirely too long over unimportant details and fail to get the important ones; and they pause over each word, reading words rather than thoughts. It is questionable whether one who reads every word separately ever achieves a real comprehension of what he reads; because we do not think in words, but in word groups. This is the reason that very slow readers are usually poor readers, though one might expect the opposite to be true. The slow reader takes his words one at a time, and does not group them and fuse them into one thought image. The first thing for a slow reader to learn, then, is to see words in groups. Let us look at the preceding sentence as an example of reading words in groups. It naturally divides into the following groups: The first thing for a slow reader to learn, - then, is to see words in groups. The mind quickly learns to skip over