1.3.1 Critical Reading
1.3.1 Critical Reading
- What is the author's main idea? The title and the first and last paragraphs should give you strong clues.
- What evidence and examples support the main idea? Do the examples make sense? Are they true? How can you tell?
- What is the author trying to make you feel? Has the writer made any assumptions or used emotional language or other techniques to persuade you? These techniques can convince you to agree with an issue by appealing to your feelings
or some ideas you already have that are not necessarily based on fact.
- What is the author's perspective? If the perspective is not shown clearly in the reading, you might be able to find out by doing more research. Details of the author's background might help you understand his or her position better.
- Has the author convinced you? With what ideas in the reading do you agree? What makes you doubt some ideas?
Keep each of these questions in mind as you read the passage below.
Are You One of A Kind?
You are not normal! If you are reading these pages, you belong to the minority of the world's population that goes to school, has access to health care and social security, and enjoys many freedoms. You no doubt live on more than $2 a day, and, unlike
14% of the world's adults, you can read. (UNESCO Institute for Statistics, 2017) Very few people have all these attributes.
You do not live the way most people live. About 10% the people in the world live on less than $2 per day. The average income worldwide is just over $10 000 annually, less than 1/4 the average income in Canada. 23% of children worldwide are malnourished.
(World Bank Key Development Data) One hundred and nine of the world's 195 nations are either
not free or
partially free, meaning that the liberties and basic political rights of their citizens are limited or severely curtailed. About 4.5 billion people, well over 50% of the world, live in such countries. (Freedom House)
Most people in the world are poor and oppressed. Statistically, a normal human being in today's world is poor, lives in oppressive physical, social, and political conditions, and is ruled by an unresponsive and/or non-democratic government. But being normal is not only defined by statistics. Normal implies something that is usual, typical, or expected. Therefore, normal is not only what is most frequent, but also what others expect. The expectations of the minority override the realities of the majority. An enormous gap occurs between what average citizens in advanced Western democracies think is normal and the reality faced by the overwhelming majority of people.
What is normal? We assume that normal is eating at least three meals a day, walking the streets without fear, and having access to water, electricity, phones, and public transportation. That might be what we expect, but it is not reality for most people.
- 795 million people do not get enough to eat on a regular basis. (worldhunger.org, 2016)
- Almost 1 billion people, or 13% of the world's population, lack electricity. (World Bank, 2016)
- 2.5 billion people rely on wood and/or animal dung for cooking and heating. (World Energy Council,
2015)
- It is estimated that there are more mobile devices (e.g. cellphones) in the world than people. However, in some countries in the world, fewer than 10% of people have a cell phone. (World Bank, 2016)
- 73 million children under the age of 12 work to stay alive. (International Labour Office, 2016)
- Maternal mortality in low income countries is 1 per 202 children born, while in Canada that figure drops to about 1 in 14 000 children born. (World Bank,
2015)
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After you have read the article "Are You One of a Kind?", complete the self-test on the following page.
Look at the feedback to each question. |