A good modern newspaper is an extraordinary piece of reading. It is remarkable first for what it contains: the range of news from local crime to international politics, from sports to
business to fashion to science, and the range of comment and special features (特写) as well,
from editorial page to feature articles and interviews to criticism of books, art ,theatre, and
music. A newspaper is even more remarkable for the way one reads it: never completely,
never straight through, but always by jumping from here to there, in and out, glancing at one
piece, reading another article all the way through, reading just a few paragraphs of the next.
A good modern newspaper offers a variety to attract many different readers, but far more
than any one reader is interested in. What brings this
variety together in one place is its
topicality (时事性),its immediate relation to what is happening in your world and your locality
now. But immediacy and the speed of production that goes with it mean also that much of what
appears in a newspaper has no more than transient (短暂的) value. For all these reasons, no
two people really read the same paper: what each person does is to put together, out of the
pages of that day"s paper, his own selection and sequence, his own newspaper. For all these
reasons, reading newspapers efficiently, wh
ich means getting what you want from them without
missing things you need but without wasting time, demands skill and self-awareness as you modify
and apply the techniques of reading.