“The only reason why a person quits his studies or becomes confused or learning disabled is because he missed a word that was not understood. Has it ever happened to you that after reading a page you realized that you didn’t remember anything you read? Well, somewhere on this page you missed a word whose meaning you did not understand or misunderstood.” Ron Hubbard Read the text below, this is an excerpt from The Little Prince in French: Lorsque j'avais six ans j'ai vu, une fois, une magnifique image, dans un livre sur la Foret Vierge qui s'appelait "Histoires Vecues". Ca representait un serpent boa qui avalait un fauve. Voila la copie du dessin. If you do not know French, the meaning of the text will remain unclear. This is natural. Textbooks on speed reading give many reasons for slow reading: • articulation - speaking the text to oneself; • regressions - recurrent eye movements for the purpose of re-reading what has already been read; • narrow field of vision... But, in the example with the French language, all this is not important, because the most important thing is unknown - the meaning of words. The main and primary thing is to know the words. If an unfamiliar word is encountered in the text, the reading speed slows down (see study of boundaries). In addition, a person is able to recognize letters faster in the context of a word than individually (the “word superiority effect”). That is, if we know a word, we will read it faster. After all, what is a word? This is a kind of archive. Just as we archive files on a computer to reduce their size, so a word compresses other words. For example, you can say: “a book edition containing two works that begin on different sides of the book block.” Or the same thing in short: “alligat”. Thus, to increase your reading speed, you need to know as many words as possible. And to do this, you need to expand your vocabulary (thesaurus). This is easy to do: 1) Find a dictionary on the topic you are studying. Paper or electronic. 2) Sometimes in your spare time read the dictionary. You will be surprised to know how many words there are. For example, I am interested in information on the design of texts. I open the “Publishing Dictionary-Reference Book” and recognize unknown words starting with the letter “A”: alligator, ampersand, antiqua, ambalage, entrefile, asterisk... Usually words are learned when studying foreign languages. But why not learn Russian words instead of foreign words? Every day you can learn something new. This will not only increase your reading speed, but also speed up your thinking..