How does your reading proceed? Clearly you try to comprehend, in the sense of identifying meanings for individual words and working out relationships between them, drawing on your explicit knowledge of English grammar (1) ______you begin to infer a context for the text, for instance, by making decisions about what kind of speech event is involved: who is making the utterance, to whom, when and where. The ways of reading indicated here are without doubt kinds of of comprehension. But they show comprehension to consist not just passive assimilation but of active engagement inference and problem-solving. You infer information you feel the writer has invited you to grasp by presenting you with specific evidence and cues (2) _______ Conceived in this way, comprehension will not follow exactly the same track for each reader. What is in question is not the retrieval of an absolute, fixed or “true” meaning that can be read off and clocked for accuracy, or some timeless relation of the text to the world. (3) _______ Such background material inevitably reflects who we are, (4) _______This doesn’t, however, make interpretation merely relative or even pointless. Precisely because readers from different historical periods, places and social experiences produce different but overlapping readings of the same words on the page-including for texts that engage with fundamental human concerns-debates about texts can play an important role in social discussion of beliefs and values. How we read a given text also depends to some extent on our particular interest in reading it. (5)_______such dimensions of read suggest-as others introduced later in the book will also do-that we bring an implicit (often unacknowledged) agenda to any act of reading. It doesn’t then necessarily follow that one kind of reading is fuller, more advanced or more worthwhile than another. Ideally, different kinds of reading inform each other, and act as useful reference points for and counterbalances to one another. Together, they make up the reading component of your overall literacy or relationship to your surrounding textual environment.