Comprehension Strategy
Skimming, question-first reading, keyword anchoring, and time budgeting
1. Skim before you read
Before reading a passage word-for-word, spend 15–20 seconds skimming it: read the first sentence of each paragraph, and glance at the last line of the passage. This gives you the passage’s overall shape — is it describing a process, arguing a position, comparing two things, narrating an event — before you commit to reading it in full.
Skimming isn’t about understanding every detail. It’s about building a rough map of the passage, so that when a question later asks "where does the author discuss X," you already have a sense of which paragraph to check, instead of re-reading the whole passage from scratch.
A passage with short paragraphs and a title (common in bank exams) usually tells you its structure directly — skim the title and paragraph breaks first.