Many students trying to increase their effective reading speed become discouraged when they find that if they try to race through passages faster, they fail to take what they have read. At the end, they have been so busy 'reading faster' that they cannot remember what the passage was about. The problem is that the material they are practicing on is either too difficult for them in vocabulary or content, or not sufficiently interesting. I hope my following lectures will be both interesting and fairly easy, but you should also practice reading as much as you can in your own time.