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Reading speed test, with a comprehension check.
Most speed tests stop at words per minute, which rewards skimming. This one asks five questions afterwards, so the number you get is the speed at which you actually understood. It takes about two minutes.
Choose a passage
Three short non-fiction passages, each around 300 words, at three levels of difficulty. Pick whichever sounds interesting; you will be asked about it afterwards.
Read at your normal pace
The clock is running. Read the way you would if you needed to remember this; press “I’m done” the moment you reach the end.
Five questions about the passage
Each has one right answer, and every answer is in the passage you just read. Do not go back; that is the point.
That was a skim.
Your result
- Speed
- 0wpm
- Comprehension
- 0%
- Effective rate
- 0wpm
Adult average: about 238 wpm for English non-fiction (Brysbaert, 2019)
Now read something you actually need to understand.
NeuroSprint is a reader for dense material: paste any text or open a PDF, read with a highlighter pacer, then explain the passage back and get an honest grade. Free, no account needed, and your documents stay in your browser.
Open the readerNotes About reading speed
Three things worth knowing about the number.
What is the average reading speed?
About 238 words per minute for adults reading English non-fiction silently, and about 260 for fiction, according to a 2019 meta-analysis of reading-rate studies by Marc Brysbaert. Most adults fall between roughly 175 and 300. Speed also depends on the text: a dense contract or a methods section is read far more slowly than a magazine article, and it should be.
Does speed reading work?
Not in the way it is sold. A 2016 review of the research by Rayner, Schotter, Masson, Potter and Treiman found that claims of reading several times faster with the same understanding do not hold up: past your natural pace, speed is traded for comprehension. The limit is not how fast your eyes move but how fast you can recognise words and put the meaning together, which is why techniques that suppress inner speech or widen the eye span do not deliver.
How can I improve my comprehension?
Test yourself on what you read instead of reading it again. Decades of research on retrieval practice show that trying to recall material, or explain it in your own words, improves how much of it you keep, and beats rereading and highlighting by a wide margin. Stop at the end of a section, look away, and say what it said. That is what NeuroSprint is built around.