Reading-04-08.docVIP

Complete the following task before you read the text. What is your view about reading? Do you agree that books are gateways to other worlds? Give your answer by: * filling in the questionnaire for yourself. * comparing your answers with your classmates’. 1. Reading helps us expand our horizons as we learn more about people and the world. 2. Reading helps us develop an ability to understand how other people think and feel. 3. Fiction is a great way to take a quick immediate break, to be instantly transported into another world. 4. Reading a good story can help us forget some of the problems in our own life. 5. Reading, as opposed to TV, allows us to form our own images, and our own thoughts from what we absorb from a good book. 6. Fiction is capable of provoking many and varied emotional responses, making us laugh out loud, making tears spill onto the page, making us blush with embarrassment, and challenging our own beliefs. Yes. No. Why? _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ _____ What’s Right About Reading Ever since I was very small, I’ve had the sense that I ought to be somewhere else. I remember watching trains click by -- a blur of gray, the diamond glitter of sunshine on glass -- and wishing I was aboard. I remember going to the airport with my parents when I was 13 and reading the destinations board, seeing all the places I could go: San Juan, Cincinnati, Los Angeles, London. But the trains sped by and the planes took off without me, so I wandered the world through books. I went to Victorian England in the pages of Middlemarch and A Little Princess, and to St. Petersburg before the fall of the czar with Anna Karenina. I went to Tara and Manderley and Thornfield Hall, all those great houses with their high ceilings and high drama, as I read Gone with the Wind, Rebec