Welcome to the Online Learning Center (OLC) for Exercise Your College Reading Skills. It contains a wealth of resources to enhance and reinforce your learning.

OPENING SECTIONS OF THE BOOK
The Student OLC contains activities related to "The ‘Secrets' of Success." There is a PowerPoint presentation, as well as information about barriers to success and setting goals. These will be helpful from the beginning of the semester. (There is also information about learning styles and how to identify your learning style. Appendix 5 contains learning style tips. Consult it after determining your learning style.)

SKILLS CHAPTERS
There are activities for all of the skills chapters. These are Chapters 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 8, 9, 10,11,13, and 14. (Chapters 7, 12, and 15, which are review chapters.) The skills chapter activities are grouped with the chapter they accompany. Your instructor will tell you which activities to do and the order in which to do them.

The skills chapters for which there are OLC activities are:
Part I: Warm-Up
     Chapter 1: Determine the Meaning of an Unfamiliar Word through Context
     Chapter 2: Analyze Word Structure

Part II: Basic Workout
     Chapter 3: Determine the Topic of a Paragraph
     Chapter 4: Identify the Stated Main Idea Sentence and the Supporting Details of a Paragraph
     Chapter 5: Formulate the Implied Main Idea Sentence of a Paragraph
     Chapter 6: Recognize Author's Writing Patterns

Part IV: Advanced Workout
     Chapter 8: Distinguish Facts from Opinions
     Chapter 9: Make Inferences and Drawing Conclusions
     Chapter 10: Determine an Author's Purpose, Tone, Point of View, and Intended Audience
     Chapter 11: Evaluating an Author's Argument

Part VI: Cooldown
     Chapter 13: Interpret Graphic Aids
     Chapter 14: Organize Information for Study

The chapter activities consist of:

• A PowerPoint presentation of the important concepts and terms in the chapter
• A chapter quiz that lets you test your knowledge of important concepts and terms in chapters
• supplemental exercises that vary in number and type according to the specific chapter and provide additional practice
• a full-length reading selection with questions and activities to go with it

Here is a description of each type of activity in the skills chapters:

PowerPoint Presentation
There is a PowerPoint presentation for each of the skills chapters. These presentations capture key concepts and definitions. Your instructor may have you use the presentations to preview or to review important concepts and terms. They are excellent preparation for the Chapter Quiz. (Because Chapter 4 includes both stated main ideas and supporting details, there are two PowerPoint presentations for it.)

Chapter Quiz
For each skills chapter there is a quiz that tests your knowledge of important concepts and terms presented in the chapter. (This important information also appears in the PowerPoint presentations, a food way to review.) The quiz is a 15-item multiple-choice test. Your instructor may have you submit your answers electronically to him or her. You will be able to see which items you missed on the quiz.

Supplemental Exercises
In the chapters there are supplemental exercises that you can answer online. You instructor will tell you which ones to do. Many of these exercises are shorter and simpler, so they will be helpful to you as you are first learning a skill. Other exercises provide additional practice or review. Your instructor may assign you to do some of these exercises collaboratively (with another student).

Reading Selection
These selections are from college textbooks and are longer than most of the selections in the chapters themselves. As the list below shows, the reading selections represent a variety of content areas.

Chapter 1: "What Computers, Can, Cannot, and Should Not Do" (computer science)
Chapter 2: "Protecting Vision and Hearing" (biology)
Chapter 3: "Dating and Matchmaking Services" (marriage and family)
Chapter 4: "Improving Your Memory" (psychology)
Chapter 5: "The Scientific Method; Organized Common Sense" (biology)
Chapter 6: "Managing Your Debts" (personal finance)
Chapter 8: "Sleep" (health and fitness)
Chapter 9: "Public Education: leveling though the Schools" (political science)
Chapter 10: "Prejudice against Arab and Muslim Americans" (sociology)
Chapter 11: "Plants: Could We Do without Them?" (biology)
Chapter 13: "Following Politics in the Media" (political science)
Chapter 14: "High-Tech Crimes" (criminology)

Each reading selection is accompanied by these activities:

• A 15-item multiple-choice quiz which consists of 5 comprehension questions of the sort a content area instructor might ask on a test, 5 vocabulary in context items that feature words from the selection, and 5 reading skills applications questions. You will be graded on the 15-item quiz. You can submit your answers electronically to your instructor.
• Writing prompts that give you an opportunity to react to what you have read, to make personal connections, and to think critically about the material in the selection. If your instructor assigns the writing prompts, he or she will grade them.
• To the Web consists of websites related to the topic of the selection, along with questions based on the information from the website. These allow you to extend your thinking about the selection.

REVIEW CHAPTERS
Two of the review chapters, Chapters 7 and 12, contain a lengthier review test. These consist of two 50-item multiple-choice tests, one over the concepts and terms in the Basic Workout (Chapter 7) and one over those in the Advanced Workout (Chapter 12). The tests consist of items from individual chapter quizzes.