FOR OUR STUDENTS PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE To our students, People are not born readers and reading is a skill that can be learned and improved. If you are already a good reader in your native language, all you need to do is to approach reading in a foreign language with the same enthusiasm. If you think you are not good enough at reading, then take this book as a chance for a new start. You have to read a lot for your studies in your department of the university, and this book may show you the ways to deal with reading. You already know that the biggest difficulty when reading in a foreign language is the vocabulary, so try to do your best to increase your knowledge of words as much as possible. This book is for you. We hope it will help you enjoy reading in English! F. Gülsen & G. Tolungüç To our colleagues, The book is intended for our post-beginner-level DBE students, who have had a minimum of 70 – 80 class hours of instruction covering the preliminaries of the English language. The purpose is to help them enjoy reading in English, increase an awareness of reading, develop and improve their reading skills and provide them with the basic vocabulary necessary for academic reading. The units in the book have readings which try to cover different aspects of the same topic with a variety of exercises. Before each unit, there is a “Skills Section,” the aim of which is to familiarize the students with the basic reading skills and give them the chance to practice these skills. In this way, they will hopefully be more aware and successful when dealing with the readings in the units. Each unit starts with a “Think And Talk Before You Read” section. The purpose is to make students uncover their background knowledge and thus prepare them for reading. The exercises in “Do While You Read” sections usually aim for an overall understanding of the text, while “Read, Understand And Answer” sections require a more careful and critical reading. “Just For Fun” sections are intended as breaks for students if there is extra time to do them. “Go On Reading”s can be used in many ways, as outside reading material for the students who have enjoyed the topic or as additional practice or quiz material for the teachers who want to use them. As for the final unit, the “Consolidation” tries to bring together the various pieces of reading as a skill and provide an overall understanding of reading as a natural process. Piloting feedback supports our initial recommendation of five hours for each unit including the Skills Section. Yet, slight changes in timing should be allowed for because the book has been purposefully designed in such a way that both the content and the length of the units vary to avoid monotony. The time allotted does not include “Go On Reading”s. The book also has a “Teacher’s Manual,” which provides the answer key and our suggestions on the vocabulary to be pre-taught. Special emphasis has been given to vocabulary development, practice and recycling throughout the book. The vocabulary list of the book covers over 750 of the most frequent words of English necessary for academic reading. It is based on international word lists with frequency counts, namely GSL (General Service List), revised by J. Bauman and B. Culligan, 1995, and UWL (University Word List), revised by A. Coxhead, 2000, as AWL (Academic Word List). It has also been checked against the word lists of the PSR (Physical Science Reader) Series by S. Öniz, T. Cross and A. Toppare, 1981, which is a course book used for many years in the department. Vocabulary which is necessary for comprehension has been suggested as items to be pre-taught in the “Teacher’s Manual.” These items have not been included in the final vocabulary list unless they are of the required frequency, and sometimes a particular item may appear more than once in different lists to be pre-taught so that the students remember the word before they start reading. Depending on the level and the needs of the class, teachers should feel free to make changes in our lists. Please remember that any kind of feedback would be most welcome! A final word on the references. Technology and the Internet enabled us to create the book in a –-relatively-- short time by making it easy for us to reach various sources and do a lot of reading to learn about different topics before writing the texts and the exercises. We would like to note once more that the starting point of the book is the wish to provide our students with newer, more up-to-date and hopefully more interesting material. We believe that our colleagues can come up with much better products and strongly hope that many other books will soon follow ours. We hope that working with www.dbe.off-line.readings1 will be an enjoyable experience both for you and your students. F. Gülsen & G. Tolungüç Thanks... We owe thanks to many of our colleagues, without whose help this book would be lacking in many respects. Taking this chance, thank you, Zuhal Sayman, for your continuous support, and for your evaluation, review and constructive criticism of the book, Steve Riva, for the hours you spent editing the material, Demet Köksal, Zeynep Alıcı, Sibel Tüzel-Köymen, Işık Arıkan and Asuman Sayıner for the time you spared to proof-read the material with your heavy workload, Tijen Oktay, Hale Binay, Deniz Atikoğlu, Ömür Aras and Gülsima Baykal, for your hard work and good-will in piloting the material and the valuable feedback you have given us, The students who wholeheartedly cooperated during the piloting of the material, Nurcan Tugay-Kandiller, for your help and support to clarify our minds, Bahar Akçora, for your helpful ideas and contributions to the book, The writers of some materials included in the book and the owners of many Internet sites who very kindly granted us permission to use them, And all our colleagues, who encouraged us throughout the year. TABLE OF CONTENTS Skills Section: Surveying ............................................................................... 1 Unit 1: Countries And Cultures ........................................................................ 2 Reading 1: The Snake Charmers Of India ................................................................................................................... 3 Reading 2: The Day Of The Dead In Mexico ............................................................................................................. 4 Reading 3: World Records From Thailand ................................................................................................................... 6 Reading 4: The People Of Kenya .................................................................................................................................... 8 Reading 5: Sumo Wrestling In Japan ..........................................................................................................................10 Vocabulary List ...................................................................................................................................................................13 Go On Reading: Chinese New Year ................................................................................................................................14 Go On Reading: Whirling Dervishes From Turkey ...................................................................................................15 Skills Section: Understanding References ............................................................ 16 Skills Section: Guessing Vocabulary .................................................................. 18 Vocabulary Development: Identifying Parts Of Speech ............................................. 22 Unit 2: Astronomy ..................................................................................... 23 Reading 1: The Universe.................................................................................................................................................. 24 Reading 2: All About Our Solar System .................................................................................................................... 26 Reading 3: Pluto ................................................................................................................................................................. 30 Reading 4: Comets............................................................................................................................................................. 32 Reading 5: Living In Space ............................................................................................................................................. 34 Vocabulary List .................................................................................................................................................................. 38 Go On Reading: Meteor Showers ................................................................................................................................. 39 Go On Reading: Black Holes ........................................................................................................................................... 40 Skills Section: Note-taking ........................................................................... 41 Vocabulary Development: Dictionary Use ............................................................ 44 Vocabulary Development: Collocations ................................................................ 47 Unit 3: Food And Nutrition ..........................................................................