To cast your eyes quickly over a text to get the general 'gist' or overall sense of what it is about is to?

• A. Context
• B. Scan
• C. Skim
• D. Audience

Answer: (C)

Skimming is the quick reading approach used to grasp the overall meaning of a text. When you skim, you move through rapidly, focusing on features that signal the main idea—titles and headings, topic sentences, opening and closing paragraphs, and any concluding ideas. The goal is to get a sense of what the text is about, its purpose, and its general structure without reading every word. This makes it a handy first step to decide whether to read more closely or to extract a gist quickly for study or planning. In contrast, scanning is about locating specific details once you know the text might contain them; context refers to the surrounding text that helps interpret a term or idea; audience means the intended reader for whom the text is written.