Best techniques to improve your reading - Skimming

Last updated: February 13, 2025

This article is going to focus on useful reading tips, and resources to do IELTS reading practice and tests, as well as certain reading exercises!

Reading strategies

There are dozens if not hundreds of reading strategies, to help prepare for exams, and if you try to use all of them, probably it is not going to bring a lot of use to you, so we are going to focus on two main strategies: Skimming and Scanning.

They sound alike, but here are the differences between them!

Skimming

Skimming or as it is also called, reading for general information, is exactly what it sounds like, you go through the text reading just main points, finding important parts, main ideas, and key words!

And you are probably asking yourself: “well and how do I know what are the keywords and main ideas, how do I find them??????”

Not to worry, particularly to answer this question there are such things as topic sentences. They are sentences that summarize the main ideas of the paragraph and serve as an introduction, as you probably already understood at the start of a sentence! And of course you mustn’t skip the free to take summaries, or as they are usually called: headings and titles and of course pictures if any are present in the text

Try skimming this text to find the Topic sentences!

(Original article This article does not belong to GrammarTrack.com in any capacity and is a copy of an article “Things that go bump in your flight” by The Economist)

New sensing technologies could improve air safety by providing advance warning of turbulence

A. Along with dodgy food, cramped seating and screaming infants, turbulence is one of the banes of modern air travel. Avoiding turbulence is a somewhat haphazard business. Pilots do their best to fly around storms and to steer clear of turbulent areas reported by aircraft further along the route. But a series of experiments that has just finished in Colorado could eliminate some of the guesswork by enabling airliners’ existing radar systems to pick up signs of the most common kind of turbulence, called “convective” turbulence, with just a simple software upgrade.

B. The radar systems in question are currently used to detect an even more undesirable atmospheric condition called wind-shear. This dangerous phenomenon occurs during a storm, when a rapidly descending column of air hits the ground and spreads out. An aircraft flying into such a column experiences a headwind, followed by a downdraft and then a tailwind. If the aircraft is flying at a low altitude, the sudden tailwind can rob it of lift and cause a crash.

C. Wind-shear is detected by transmitting a stream of radio pulses in front of the aircraft. By analyzing a tiny change in frequency, called the Doppler shift (caused when the pulses bounce off moving raindrops), it is possible to work out how fast the drops are moving and hence the pattern of air movement in front of the aircraft. An alarm sounds if the characteristic sign of wind-shear, which is a headwind with a tailwind behind it, is detected. After several crashes in the 1970s and 1980s, such radar systems are now installed on many modern airliners.

D. These systems are, however, used only at altitudes below 700m (2,300ft) and are switched off during the rest of the flight. This set Larry Cornman, an atmospheric scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colorado, thinking. Could not the same equipment be put to use during flight to detect turbulence?

E. In theory, the answer is yes. Raindrops in calm air are all carried along at the same speed and in the same direction, so radio pulses bouncing off them are all Doppler-shifted by the same amount. Raindrops within a turbulent region, in contrast, have a wide range of speeds and directions as they are tossed around, resulting in a wide range of Doppler shifts. So by correctly processing the readings from the radar system, it ought to be possible to detect approaching pockets of turbulence.

F. Only about 60% of turbulence, however, is associated with storms. Radar systems cannot, for example, detect “clear-air turbulence” (CAT), a particularly nasty variety that, as its name suggests, occurs unexpectedly in clear air. Even with no raindrops around to bounce radar pulses off, CAT can still be detected using a light-based radar or “lidar”, which measures how light from a laser beam is scattered by tiny airborne particles called aerosols. A lidar-based CAT detector was tested successfully last year by America’s space agency, NASA, and further tests are planned.

G. Yet another kind of turbulence is terrain-induced, and causes problems at airports in mountainous regions. But it too can be predicted. Using readings from an instrument-equipped plane in the air, in combination with ground-based windspeed sensors and radars, it is possible to build a mathematical model for a particular airport that can then be used to predict turbulence solely from measurement taken on the ground. Such a system is already in place at Hong Kong airport, and NCAR researchers are now testing a more advanced system at Juneau, Alaska, an airport where terrain-induced turbulence is a particular problem.

What to do after skimming?

Well, that is pretty easy, remember the information and do the tasks, one of the best tasks to practice your skimming skills is matching headings to paragraphs! Let’s try this out: Here are headings, assign them to paragraphs A-G, use the topic sentences that you have!

1. Available techniques along with emerging research developments
2. Ground-based approaches to predicting
3. A weather phenomenon that poses significant safety risks
4. An alternative method used during clear conditions
5. Techniques for detecting convective turbulence
6. Repurposing an existing system for a new use
7. Methods for detecting wind shear