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"Today I read the article "Learning with Passion", which says that you need to read more, and I remembered an article in the magazine "Technology for Youth" about speed reading. Unfortunately, I don't remember the issue of the magazine, the only thing I remember is that it's an issue that talks about snakes and has a picture of a snake on the cover. We read an average of 100-150 words per minute, while Napoleon, Goethe, and Lenin could read about 2000 words per minute. Article 6 has tips on how to learn to read quickly, but not everything is clear. Probably, many children would like to learn to read quickly. Please write about it. Good bye!

Lyudmila Nenasheva, 7th grade. Tashkent".

Instead of answering, I will tell a story about a student. He studied at the Faculty of Philology of Moscow University. Perhaps in no other educational institution do you need to read as much as at the Faculty of Philology. Lists of thick books for exams are made up of pages and pages.

And the student I'm talking about read terribly slowly. From the outside, one could think that he was reading in the warehouses - he moved his lips, wrinkled his brow, and his whole face showed that the hardest work was going on. Once I had to take an exam in the history of the USSR. The university course is a kind of brick three fingers thick. Time, as always with students, was lost; Overcoming the textbook was out of the question. The student was in despair. His friends prompted him: "And you take a textbook for the tenth grade, it is thinner." They took out an old textbook somewhere, brought it — the student looked at it rather dejectedly. A bit thick, not to read in the remaining five days, even if you sit over a book from morning to evening. Then he found a textbook... for the fourth grade. He walked along the gallery of the auditorium building on Mokhovaya Street, where the monument to Lomonosov is, and, bumping into people he met, slowly, with great effort, read a textbook for fourth-graders. I read it on time. And what he read there, what work he did in his mind, what happened at the exam is unknown. It is only known that he received "excellent" and his answer was especially noted by the examiner as unusually deep, informative and original.

Learning to read quickly is relatively easy. Some exercises (preferably with special devices that set the pace and kind of whip the reader on), some practice, and then – read, read, learn to quickly grasp the general meaning of the paragraph and page.

But it is a thousand times more difficult to learn to read slowly. There are no devices that would help with this.

We have already talked about what it means to comprehend the text of a textbook and how difficult it is.

It is even more difficult to read fiction, because writers and poets try (this is their purpose) to convey a meaning that a scientist is unable to convey. A scientist can find, put into a concept and convey to the reader an exact and only accurate meaning. A scholar cannot allow any of his words to be interpreted in two or more ways, otherwise he will not be a scholar. If he starts saying something vague, readers will turn away from him, say, "There's no science here," and he'll lose his credibility. Science always deals with precise meanings.

But in real life, there is very little or almost no exactness. In life, everything is indefinite, polysemantic, unclearly outlined. To give to the vague images of life at least a certain precision and definiteness, so that these images can be expressed in words — this is what poets and writers struggle with, this is their unspeakable suffering. They strive for exact precision where there can be no exactness, and they know that there can be none, and yet they dream of it and strive for it as if it were an unattainable beauty.

Discoveries are made by both the scientist and the writer. A fiction book in which there are no discoveries is as invaluable and insignificant as a book by a scientist in which there are no discoveries. The more new, the more discoveries and the more significant the eyes, the more valuable the book, the more readers it will have and the longer it will be read. There have always been people like Don Quixote, even before Cervantes. But Cervantes made a discovery: he singled out the type of such people, outlined them, presented them in all their depth, and called his discovery Don Quixote. And now, when we meet such an idealist dreamer, a selflessly bold but uncalculating fighter, we take advantage of Cervantes's discovery and say of man: "This is Don Quixote." No words, no concepts can express what we want to say. Whole pages of precise definitions will not convey all the meaning and our attitude to the phenomenon contained in the word "Don Quixote". There are many such examples. Say about a person "fruitless dreamer" – your interlocutor will require many, many explanations. Say: "This is Manilov" and you will be understood immediately.

Classics, we repeat, are classics because they contain significant discoveries that mankind uses.

The word of a scientist, a scientific article and a textbook must be comprehended, put into them their own meaning, which exactly coincides with the thought of the scientist.