How To Read A Book- A Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading - Mortimer J. Adler, Charles Van Doren [169]
It has become commonplace to criticize reading exercises and test questions on the grounds that they are not scientifically standardized, that they are culturally discriminatory, that by themselves they are not reliably predictive of success in schooling or in subsequent career progress, that questions often permit of more than one appropriate or "correct" answer, and that for all these reasons, grading by tests is to a certain extent arbitrary.
Much of this and similar criticism of the tests is valid, particularly if major decisions about school standing or placement, or about employment opportunities, are based exclusively on results drawn from these tests. However, many of the tests do effectively distinguish or identify degrees of competence, and they will continue to be widely employed in making academic and career judgments about individuals.
Even if there were no other reasons, this reason by itself makes it desirable that the reader have some familiarity with the mechanics of these exercises and test questions.
It is particularly to be noted that the texts used in most such reading exercises are selected primarily for the sake of the test questions that are based on them. Hence the texts themselves are for the most part unrelated; frequently they are fragments-bits and pieces of technical pedantry or mere trivia.
In this Appendix, merely exemplary though it be, the emphasis is quite otherwise. The texts used for practice and to provide material for testing are themselves worth reading.
Indeed, they are indispensable reading for anyone who wishes Appendix B 365
to advance beyond the first levels of reading. The texts are selected and the questions based on them are designed as tools for learning how to read what is worth reading.
A word about the form of the questions used in the tests that appear in the following pages. It is customary in such tests to employ a number of different kinds of questions. There are essay questions and multiple-choice questions. An essay question, of course, requires the person being tested to respond to something he has read in an extended statement. Multiplechoice questions are in tum of many kinds; usually they are presented in homogeneous groups. Sometimes a series of statements follows the reading exercise, and the person being tested is asked to indicate which statement best expresses the main idea or ideas of the passage read. In other cases the reader may be offered a choice of statements about a detail in the text, only one of which is a valid interpretation of the text, or at least is more apt than the others; or it may be the other way around; one is an incorrect choice, and the others are correct. Or a verbatim quotation may be given from the text to discover whether the reader has taken note of it and remembered it. Sometimes, in a statement either quoted directly or simply drawn from the text the reader will find a blank indicating that one or more words that will make sense of the statement have been omitted. Then follows a list of choices, lettered or numbered, among which the person being tested is asked to choose the phrase that, when inserted in the blank, best completes the statement.
Most questions may be answered directly from the passage read. But some questions require the reader to go outside the text for material that it is assumed he knows, material required to answer the question correctly. Still other questions are inferential: that is, they draw certain inferences from the text. The person taking the test is asked to select from a group of possibilities the inferences that can reasonably be drawn from the text; or he may be expected to recognize and discard inferences that are spurious and have no foundation in the text.
If one is faced with the task of creating a standardized 366 HOW TO READ A BOOK
test to be used