四、閱讀測驗
       Do you want to have a good TOEFL or TOEIC score? Maybe you should start thinking about extensivereading. Extensive reading is simply reading a lot of English at a fairly easy level, with students being able tounderstand the text without using a dictionary. Researchers have found that students who often read in English intheir free time tend to have high TOEFL scores and that reading was a better predictor of TOEFL performance thaneven the number of years studying English and living in English-speaking countries.
      In addition to gains on test scores, there should be little doubt that  it  helps students improve reading skills andreading speed. Several studies have shown that students doing extensive reading for more than one year werealmost always better and faster readers than students who did the usual “difficult” readings in the classroom. Whatis more surprising is how much extensive reading improves students’ writing skills as well as speaking skills. In onestudy conducted in Tokyo in 1998, students in extensive reading programs were evaluated as 2-3 times better inwriting when compared with students who did not read much yet actually practiced writing more! In another studycarried out in Shanghai, researchers have found that students just reading graded readers improved in both fluencyand accuracy of expression in their speaking, even though the students did very little speaking during the course ofthe study.
      Extensive reading is not the only way to learn a language. Most language scholars would agree that languagestudents still need to spend a lot of time practicing speaking, listening, writing, and so on in order to becomeadvanced in the language. However, adding extensive reading to your private study can certainly do some greatthings for your language ability. Give it a try and see what it will do for you!
【題組】46. What is this passage mainly about?
(A) Learning English.
(B) Extensive reading.
(C) Popular English readers.
(D) Effective learning strategies.