important facts or details that help develop or support it. These facts or details giveyou a deeper understanding of the main idea. They may prove a point，show arelationship between ideas，or serve as examples to help you understand the main ideamore fully.
Here are some ways to help you recognize important facts or details:
1. Read for the main idea. If you have identified the main idea，you can more easilyrecognize the important facts that support it.
2. Keep it in mind that not all facts or details are equally important. Look only for thefacts related to the main idea.
3. To check on your understanding of the material you have read，review the facts ordetails that you have decided are the most important. Then consider if they supportwhat you have identified as the main idea. If adding up the facts or details does notlead logically to the main idea，you have failed either to identify the main idea orto recognize the important supporting details.
Questions as follows are designed to test your reading comprehension of details:
What / When / Where / Why / How. . . ?
Which of the following does sb. believe / think. . . ?
It is important / necessary that .
Obviously，sb. thought that .
We learn from the first paragraph that .
It can be inferred from the passage that .
According to the passage，.
It can be concluded from sb. ??s remarks that .
Which of the following words can best describe. . . ?
Which of the following is true according to the passage?
Ⅱ. Applying the Read ing Str ategy
In this part，you are required to use the reading strategy you have just learned.
Read the following paragraphs and answer the questions after them.
( 1)
Ours has become a society of employees. A hundred years or so ago only one out of every five Americans at work was employed，i. e. ，worked for somebody else.
Today only one out of five is not employed but working for himself . And when fifty years ago“ being employed”meant working as a factory laborer or as a farmhand，the employee of today is increasingly a middleclass person with a substantial formaleducation，holding a professional or management job requiring intellectual and technical skills.
About one hundred years ago，.
A. about 20% Americans worked for other people
B. about 20% Americans worked for themselves
C. about 20% Americans were unemployed
D. about 20% Americans worked on farm
( 2)
Yet you will find little if anything written on what it is to be an employee. Youcan find a great deal of very of dubious advice on how to get a job or how to get apromotion. You can also find a good deal of work in a chosen field，whether in themechanist??s trade or bookkeeping. Every one of these trades requires different skills,sets different standards，and requires a different preparation. Yet they all haveemployeeship in common. And increasingly，especially in the large business or ingovernment，employeeship is more important to success than the special professionalknowledge or skill. Certainly more people fail because they do not know therequirements of being an employee than because they do not adequately possess theskills of their trade; the higher you climb the ladder，the more you get intoadministrative or executive work，the greater the emphasis on ability to work withinhe organization rather than on technical abilities or professional knowledge.
Why is employeeship more important to success than the professional knowledge?
A. Because people generally do not have adequate professional skills.
B. Because business is to expand on a larger scale.
C. Because professional knowledge is going to play a larger role.
D. Because a person must above all know what it is to be an employee.
Ⅲ. Reading Task
A. Pr e-r eading act ivity
Upon graduation，what kind of advice will the graduates get from school? Whatdoes the author of this text probably tell us about his graduation advice? What will theauthor possibly say to support his main ideas?
B. Reading
The Gr aduation Advice I Never Got . . .
Tucker Carlson
Across the country，college seniors are bracing themselves for the mostexcruciating ceremony of spring: the commencement address. We all know theroutine. Someone with a famous name will strut onstage and spout banalities. “Theworld awaits. . . you??re a special generation. . . go save the planet. . . . ”Blah，blah,blah.
What a wasted opportunity. If only those commencement speakers would say afew things that are practical and useful. Maybe something like this:
Greetings，graduates. And congratulations. Today you will emerge from thenurturing school to face the real world. You will think of your school every month formany years to come as you take call after call asking you to contribute to the fund -even as you are writing checks to pay off the ＄25，000 you owe in student loans.But look on the bright side. Now that you??re leaving school，you can finally goabout getting an education. To help you start，here are a few recommenda- tions forlife after college:
Sp end time with people who ar en??t like you . From day one，you got an earfulabout your school??s commitment to“ diversity. ”So you were probably surprised tofind your campus to be among the most segregated environments in America，withdifferent racial groups possibly being shunted into separate orientations，separategraduation ceremonies; even separate sections of the cafeteria. You may have beenconfused，too，by the rhetoric of your professors，who may have claimedsimultaneously that there are no differences at all between the races，and that thedifferences between the races must at all costs be celebrated and preserved.Face it，real diversity was almost nowhere to be found. And I don??t just mean theracial kind. Where was intellectual diversity when the classroom was an exercise ingroupthink? Try finding a conservative professor - it??s easier to spot a yeti.
Challenge the orthodox views of political correctness and you??ll get labeled some prettynasty things.
