In the introduction of this chapter the author is very clear that this is a book for the ones that wants to become a good reader. 



Mortimer Adler gives a definition of readers as :

"Intelligent person that gain a large share of their information about and their understanding of the world from the written word."



I consider that in this days the people prefer to watch t.v or listen the radio to know and learn things but instead of reasoning we are only believing that what someone think is ok is what we believe instead of really analyze and make questions about thins through reading and not only listening what other thinks. 



Active Reading

In this book the Author want to make a comparison between active and passive reading. 

Many people consider that reading is a passive activity but the author give a great example demonstrating why reading is active. 

 

Reading and listening are thought of as receiving communication from someone who is actively  sending the message. He explain that the error here is consider that receiving doesn't need any effort. He gave an example like being a pitcher and a catcher of baseball. The pitcher pitch the ball and send it to the receiver, for the ball to be received the catcher has to do an effort so he is active, the one that is passive is the ball. In reading we are the Catcher.



"the art of reading is the skill of catching every sort of communication as well as possible."



The Goals of Reading: Reading for Information and Reading for Understanding



When we read something that we doesn't understand or that we think that we understand things but it wasn't what the author want to communicate the author recommend us to take the reading to someone else who, you think, can read better than you, and have him explain the parts that you doesn't understand.



The author describes “learning” as:  understanding more, not remembering more information that has the same degree of intelligibility as other information you already possess.



Difficult reading destined to comprehension:

1) Initial inequality in understanding

2) The reader must be able to overcome this inequality in some degree. 



​

"The Greeks had a name for such a mixture of learning which might be applied to the 

bookish but poorly read of all ages. They are all sophomores."



In the school and at the beginning of College I consider myself a sophomore.



One of the things that I liked the most of this chapter was the part of the end of present and absent teachers. The example was about if we have a professor to ask a question of what we doesn't  understand we have the easy answer. But what happen if we didn't have no one to ask what we doesn't understand we think and reason about our question and  we can be force to read or investigate more to answer our question.