What the test measures
- Reading speed: the words in the passage divided by the minutes you took, in words per minute (wpm).
- Understood: how many of the 5 questions you got right. They ask about the main idea, about details, and about what follows from the text, which test different levels of understanding (Kintsch, 1988).
- Words understood per minute: your speed times the share you understood. Reading 238 words a minute with 80% understood makes 190. This is the number worth improving, because it can’t be raised by rushing.
What’s a normal reading speed?
Adults read non-fiction silently at about 238 words a minute, and fiction at about 260 (Brysbaert, 2019, a meta-analysis of 190 studies). Your result says how far you are from that average. More on the average reading speed.
Why there’s a quiz
A speed means little on its own. Claims of 1,000 words a minute fall apart once there are questions afterwards: going faster than you can take words in trades understanding for speed (Rayner et al., 2016). Readers are also poor judges of how much they understood (Glenberg & Epstein, 1985), so the questions do the judging. Does speed reading work?
For a fair result
- Read the way you normally would, not faster for the test.
- Looking back when you lose the thread is fine: it’s how readers repair a misunderstanding (Schotter et al., 2014).
- Choose Not sure rather than guess.
- Over 1,200 words a minute counts as skimming, not reading: the eyes can’t take in text that fast.
Questions
Is my result saved?
It stays in this browser and nowhere else. When you make your account on this device, it comes with you as the first of your four starting checks.
Can I take it again?
Yes. Take another test gives you a different passage. Gulp has 35 of them in three levels, each with 5 questions.
Can I get faster?
Some parts of reading respond to practice: how fast you recognise words, how steadily you keep a pace you can follow, and how well you skim when the gist is enough. How to read faster and keep the meaning.
Sources
- Brysbaert, M. (2019). How many words do we read per minute? A review and meta-analysis of reading rate. Journal of Memory and Language, 109, 104047.
- Glenberg, A. M., & Epstein, W. (1985). Calibration of comprehension. Journal of Experimental Psychology: Learning, Memory, and Cognition, 11(4), 702-718.
- Kintsch, W. (1988). The role of knowledge in discourse comprehension: A construction-integration model. Psychological Review, 95(2), 163-182.
- Rayner, K., Schotter, E. R., Masson, M. E. J., Potter, M. C., & Treiman, R. (2016). So much to read, so little time: How do we read, and can speed reading help? Psychological Science in the Public Interest, 17(1), 4-34.
- Schotter, E. R., Tran, R., & Rayner, K. (2014). Don’t believe what you read (only once): Comprehension is supported by regressions during reading. Psychological Science, 25(6), 1218-1226.