Reading rate & comprehension 547 words · no signup
Read This Fast
Every reading speed test hands you a number and lets you keep it. This one hides the passage afterwards and asks three questions, then multiplies your speed by how many you got right. Only that second number means anything.
The test
InstructionsStep 1 of 3
Read it the way you normally read
You will be shown a short piece of narrative non-fiction — 547 words, written for this page, about the afternoon the railways invented standard time. Read it at whatever pace you would use for a good magazine article.
- The clock starts when the text appears and stops when you say you have finished.
- No timer is shown while you read. A visible clock makes people skim, and skimming is the thing this test is built to catch.
- Afterwards the passage disappears and three questions arrive. You cannot go back.
Nothing is saved or uploaded. Take it once for a real result — on a second run you would be remembering rather than reading.
Original passage · non-fiction
The Day of Two Noons
Before the railways, nobody needed to agree what time it was.
Every town kept its own clock, and every town's clock was correct. Noon was the moment the sun stood highest over that particular place, which meant noon reached Norwich some minutes before it reached London, and Bristol about ten minutes after. Leeds ran six minutes behind the capital. These were not errors. They were the plain astronomical facts of being somewhere else, and for several centuries they inconvenienced no one, because nothing travelled fast enough for the difference to register. A letter that took two days on the road did not care about ten minutes.
Then came a machine that crossed the country between breakfast and lunch, and those ten minutes turned into a problem. First an embarrassment, then a danger. A timetable is a promise about the future, and a railway timetable is a promise made simultaneously in forty places that could not agree about the present. Worse, trains sharing a single track were kept apart by intervals of time rather than by sight. If the clock at one end of the line disagreed with the clock at the other, the safe interval was a fiction, and everyone aboard was relying on it.
So in November 1840 the Great Western Railway instructed every station on its line to abandon local time and keep London time instead. Its printed timetables did something quietly radical: they listed, town by town, exactly how wrong each place now was. Bath was eleven minutes out. Bridgwater, fourteen.
The instrument that made this possible was already sitting on the line. An electric telegraph had been installed along a stretch of the Great Western the previous year, and a signal sent down a wire arrives everywhere at once. For the first time a clock in a distant town could be corrected against a clock in Greenwich in a matter of seconds, rather than by the slow circulation of a man carrying a watch.
Adoption was quick but ungraceful. By 1855 most public clocks in Britain had gone over, though not all of them wholeheartedly: the clock at Christ Church in Oxford was fitted with two minute hands, one for local time and one for Greenwich, and kept both. The last holdout was the legal system, which went on insisting for decades that the law ran on local time, producing such absurdities as polling stations that opened at thirteen minutes past eight. Parliament settled the argument in August 1880.
America did the whole thing in a single afternoon. On the eighteenth of November 1883 the railway companies of the United States and Canada, acting entirely on their own authority, divided the continent into four zones. The federal government would not get round to endorsing this for another thirty-five years. In cities where the new noon fell after the old one, the clocks were wound back and noon happened twice. The newspapers called it the Day of Two Noons.
What changed was not really the clocks. Until then, time had been something you observed: you looked up, and the sun told you where you stood. Afterwards it was something you were told, by an authority somewhere else, and being out of step with it was no longer a fact of geography but a mistake.
Clock running — deliberately not shown
Question 1 of 3
- Raw speed
- —
- Comprehension
- —
- Effective speed
- —
The passage, untimed
The Day of Two Noons
About This Test
Read This Fast measures how quickly you read a passage and then, crucially, checks whether you took any of it in. The text vanishes, three questions appear, and the number you are given at the end is your raw words per minute multiplied by the fraction you answered correctly. A speed you cannot account for afterwards is not a reading speed. It is a scrolling speed.
This is the one thing almost every reading test on the internet leaves out, and leaving it out is what makes them fun and useless. Without a comprehension check there is no way to be wrong: skim the page in twenty seconds, click the button, and the site congratulates you on reading at 1,600 words a minute. Adding three questions costs almost nothing and changes the result completely.
The passage was written for this page rather than borrowed from anywhere, which means no copyright problem and, more usefully, no chance you have read it before. Its facts have been checked: the ten-minute gap between London and Bristol time, the electric telegraph sitting on the Great Western a year before the timetables changed, the clock at Christ Church with two minute hands, and the afternoon in 1883 when parts of America got two noons.
What The Numbers Mean
The benchmark is 238 words per minute, which is the average silent reading rate for adults reading English non-fiction. It comes from a 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies covering more than 18,000 participants — by a distance the most solid figure available. Fiction runs a little quicker at 260, mostly because its words are shorter. Reading aloud drops to 183, because at that point you are limited by your mouth rather than your eyes.
If you have seen a higher number quoted, it was probably 300, and it came from smaller and less representative samples. That correction matters here: a great many people are told they read below average when in fact they are sitting comfortably on it.
As for the ceiling, skimming for one specific piece of information can run to 400 or 500 words per minute even untrained, and practised readers can hold reasonable comprehension somewhere between 400 and 700. Above that, understanding falls away fast. The champion figures in the thousands describe a real and useful skill, but it is skimming, and skimming is a different activity that happens to use the same eyes.
Why This Exists
Because speed is the least interesting thing about reading, and it is the only thing anybody measures. The number that matters is the product of pace and attention, and those two trade against each other in a way you can feel in real time — the paragraph you finish and immediately have to start again is that trade going badly.
There is also a smaller point buried in the design. The timer is hidden while you read, and that is not decoration. Show someone a running clock and they read differently: faster, shallower, with their eye on the number rather than the sentence. Any test that displays a timer is quietly measuring how people behave when timed, which is not the same as how they read. So the clock runs where you cannot see it, and only appears once the reading is over and it is too late to game.
Finally, a caution the result screen repeats: this is one passage on one afternoon, and reading speed varies enormously with the material, your mood, the room and how interested you were. It is a snapshot, not a measurement, and if the number is lower than you hoped it is worth knowing that people who read slowly and remember everything are doing better than the reverse.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is Read This Fast?
A reading speed test that does not let you cheat. It times you on an original passage of 547 words, then hides the text and asks three questions about it. Your reported speed is your raw words per minute multiplied by the fraction you answered correctly, because a speed you cannot account for afterwards is not a reading speed.
What is a normal reading speed?
For adults reading English silently, about 238 words per minute for non-fiction and 260 for fiction. Those figures come from a 2019 meta-analysis of 190 studies covering more than 18,000 participants, and they are lower than the 300 words per minute often quoted, which came from smaller and less representative samples. Reading aloud averages 183.
Why does the timer stay hidden while I read?
Because a visible clock changes how people read. Watching the seconds tick encourages skimming, and skimming produces exactly the flattering, meaningless number this test exists to avoid. The clock runs from the moment the passage appears until you say you have finished, and only then do you see it.
Can I really not read at a thousand words a minute?
Not while understanding the text. Untrained readers can move their eyes across a page at 400 to 500 words per minute when skimming for a specific piece of information, and trained readers can hold reasonable comprehension somewhere in the 400 to 700 range, but comprehension falls away sharply above that. Claims in the thousands describe skimming, which is a genuinely useful skill and simply not the same activity.
Where did the passage come from?
It was written for this page, so nothing here is copied from a book or an article. It is a short piece of narrative non-fiction about the invention of standard time by the railways, and every date and figure in it has been checked, including the ten-minute gap between London and Bristol and the day in 1883 when parts of America experienced noon twice.
Does it work on mobile?
Yes, and the column is set to a comfortable measure on a phone rather than running the full width of the screen. Nothing is saved or uploaded. If you take the test more than once the questions stay the same, so a second attempt measures your memory rather than your reading.
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