2017-1 Manual CL2

MANUAL DE COMPRENSIÓN
DE LECTURA DE INGLÉS
NIVEL 2
Dra. Raquel Guadalupe García Jurado Velarde.

Mtra. María de los Ángeles Barba Camacho.
Lic. Frankz Marroquin Palacios.
INTRODUCCIÓN AL
MANUAL DE COMPRENSIÓN DE
LECTURA 2
Este manual se elaboró con el propósito de proporcionarte las herramientas necesarias para que te con-
viertas en un lector eficiente. En el curso se estudian los cuatro tipos de lectura más conocidos: Ágil (lec-
tura rápida para comprensión global); Analítica (lectura para encontrar información de manera detallada);
Eficaz (para localizar información a partir de un objetivo) y Óptima (lectura rápida para comprensión estra-
tégica).
Los objetivos que cubre el Curso de Comprensión abarcan dos aspectos, el de conocimientos (saber) y el de
habilidades (saber hacer) y son:
a) Realizar la lectura silenciosa independiente (Lectura Ágil, Eficaz, Analítica y Óp-

tima) de textos académicos de tipo expositivo, narrativo, descriptivo y argumenta-
tivo, escritos en inglés.
b) Extraer de un texto la información relevante para cumplir un objetivo de lectu-

ra a partir del empleo de las estrategias de lectura presentadas en el manual.
c) Poseer una competencia lingüística adecuada (domino de las estructuras sin-

tácticas incluidas en el material del curso) y comprender el texto a partir de la
correlación entre estructura y sentido.
d) Interpretar el léxico necesario para una comprensión adecuada de textos de

mediana complejidad escritos en inglés.
e) Hacer uso adecuado del diccionario bilingüe cuando no se pueda inferir el sig-
nificado de las palabras o combinaciones de palabras desconocidas en los textos.
f) Resumir por escrito las ideas fundamentales expuestas en un texto, de acuerdo

con el objetivo de la lectura propuesta.
i
FORMA DE TRABAJO
Las unidades están conformadas por Modelos Didácticos explicativos del funcionamiento de las estrate-
gias de lectura utilizadas para cada tipo de lectura y tipo de texto. A los modelos les siguen ejercicios de
presentación, práctica y consolidación del aprendizaje de dichas estrategias. También se incluyen tarjetas
de estudio que resumen la definición y uso de cada tipo de lectura y tablas de verbos y estructuras gra-
maticales.
Debes leer y comprender los modelos presentados al principio de cada unidad antes de tratar de resolver
los ejercicios. Se presenta un ejercicio modelo, donde se explica la forma en que utiliza la estrategia de
lectura a aprender, una vez que se cubre lo anterior, se deben resolver los ejercicios de práctica y autoeva-
luación. En caso de no poder resolver estos ejercicios se debe volver al modelo para localizar las partes
que no se comprendieron bien y poder reforzarlas. Se recomienda repasar las unidades del manual hasta
haber consolidado cada una de las estrategias en el orden en que se presentan. De esta manera se estarán
estudiando los temas de acuerdo a un orden progresivo que apoya el aprendizaje de cada tema.
Los autores de este manual deseamos que alcances tus objetivos de aprendizaje de manera eficaz y conso-
lidada, con apoyo de tu profesor, y adquieras las estrategias de lectura que permitan convertirte en lector
experto; al mismo tiempo esperamos que disfrutes de las lecturas elegidas y, en general, la aproximación
didáctica de estos materiales.
ii
ÍNDICE
Página
UNIDAD 1 LECTURA ANALÍTICA
2 TEMA 1: Introducción a las estrategias de lectura

7 TEMA 2: Coherencia
11 TEMA 3: Oración tópico I
16 TEMA 4: Oración tópico II
19 TEMA 5: Dependencia de párrafo
26 TEMA 6: Idea principal
31 TEMA 7: Idea central
36 TEMA 8: Palabra Clave
38 TEMA 9: Inferencia de Vocabulario
42 TEMA 10: Cohesión
46 TEMA 11: Toma de notas
51 TEMA 12: Generalización
57 TEMA 13: Clasificación
62 TEMA 14: Jerarquización

UNIDAD 2 LECTURA ÓPTIMA
69 TEMA 15: Causalidad I

72 TEMA 16: Hipótesis I: Predicción
77 TEMA 17: Hipótesis II: Inferencia
84 TEMA 18: Información relevante
90 TEMA 19: Información factual
96 TEMA 20: Causalidad II
105 TEMA 21: Síntesis I: Resumen
109 TEMA 22: Síntesis II: Cuadro sinóptico
114 TEMA 23: Síntesis III: Mapa conceptual
122 TEMA 24: Tipos de texto
128 TEMA 25: Texto deductivo
133 TEMA 26: Texto inductivo

136 ANEXOS DE GRAMÁTICA INGLESA

UNIDAD I
LECTURA
ANALÍTICA
TEMA 1: INTRODUCCIÓN A LAS ESTRATEGIAS DE LECTURA
Objetivo: Al término de este tema serás capaz de utilizar las estrategias abordadas en el nivel 1 para com-
prender textos en inglés.
Al familiarizarnos con un texto, primero nos orientamos en los elementos tipográficos e iconográficos pre-
sentes en el mismo, buscamos información sobre la procedencia del artículo, quién lo escribe, cuándo,
dónde; nos apoyamos en las palabras clave para ubicarnos en el contenido del texto. Por supuesto, pres-
tamos atención al tiempo en que sucede la acción, nos apoyamos en los formantes de palabras y en los
sustitutos para no perder la secuencia de los acontecimientos.
Todos estos elementos nos ayudan a comprender un texto, pero también sirven a otro propósito; nos per-
miten hacer deducciones acerca de las palabras que desconocemos; a este proceso se le llama inferencia
de vocabulario.
Inferir no es lo mismo que predecir. Predecimos cuando no tenemos mucha información en relación con
algo y hacemos suposiciones sobre esta información. De alguna manera tratamos de comprender de qué
se trata. Cuando inferimos no adivinamos, nos basamos en la información contenida en el texto para cons-
truir la parte que nos falta. Es como armar un rompecabezas; utilizamos las partes que hemos trabajado
para guiarnos por las formas, los colores, etc. a fin de facilitarnos la tarea de colocar las demás piezas.
Por ejemplo, si decides leer un texto que lleva el título:
ARE WE UNDERESTIMATING MT. VESUVIUS?
¿Qué podrías inferir de la información en el título? Lo primero que distingues es que es una pregunta.
Sabemos que las preguntas que aparecen en un texto no son realmente preguntas, tienen el propósito de
enfatizar el contenido del texto y se llaman preguntas retóricas. También sabemos que we no es un refe-
rente dentro de un texto, generalmente se utiliza cuando el autor hace referencia a sí mismo y al lector
(nosotros).
Además, es necesario el conocimiento previo para comprender la información; el Monte Vesubio se en-
cuentra en Italia y es famoso por una explosión volcánica en el año 79 D.C. que destruyó tres ciudades.
Otro recurso que te ayuda a comprender el texto es el reconocimiento de los cognados, palabras amigas
o palabras transparentes que comprendemos porque sus significados y escritura son similares en ambos
idiomas; por ejemplo communication = comunicación. Esta palabra es muy similar al español en su signifi-
cado y, aunque la escritura no es exactamente igual (rara vez lo es) es posible identificar la equivalencia en
español. Fíjate en la siguiente oración:
We all know the horrifying story of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D. that
buried the city of Pompeii and killed thousands of people.
Aunque sólo encontramos tres cognados, comprendemos que se trata de los rela-
tos de la horrible erupción del Monte Vesubio.
Ejercicio 1. Escribe en una oración tu interpretación sobre el siguiente párrafo, guíate en el ejemplo
anterior.
We all know the horrifying story of the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D. that
buried the city of Pompeii and killed thousands of people. What we don’t know is
2
how exactly they died. There is only one historical witness account of what happe-
ned in 79 A.D. on August 24. From far away, Pliny the Younger reported watching
his uncle succumb to a cloud of ash and smoke.
______________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________
La distribución del enunciado también nos permite encontrar el significado de las palabras que descono-
cemos. Recuerda que es recomendable encontrar el mínimo comunicativo de cada oración.
Historians interpreted this information to mean that the victims from Pompeii,
Herculaneum, and Oplontis, who were not crushed from flying rocks or buried
underneath collapsing building, died from suffocation due to a lethal cocktail of
ash and volcanic gas.
El primer mínimo comunicativo que encuentras en el párrafo es Historians (sustantivo) + interpreted (ver-
bo). La distribución del enunciado te ayuda a interpretar el resto de la oración:
¿Qué interpretaron? La descripción de Plineo el joven.

¿Cuál fue esa interpretación? Las víctimas de la erupción murieron:
a. Aplastados por las rocas.

b. Aplastados en las construcciones.
c. Sofocados por ceniza y gases tóxicos.
Lee el siguiente texto y responde los ejercicios que le siguen.
Ejercicio 2. Subraya las palabras clave y los conectores.
Ejercicio 3. Localiza las relaciones temporales del texto.
ARE WE UNDERESTIMATING MT. VESUVIUS?

ANALYSIS BY ZAHRA HIRJI
Sun Aug 15, 2010 03:51 PM ET

I. We all know the horrifying story of the eruption
of Mt. Vesuvius in 79 A.D. that buried the city of
Pompeii and killed thousands of people. What we
don’t know is how exactly they died. There is only
one historical witness account of what happened
in 79 A.D. on August 24. From far away, Pliny the
Younger reported watching his uncle succumb to a
cloud of ash and smoke.
II. Historians interpreted this information to mean that
the victims from Pompeii, Herculaneum, and Oplontis,
Image: Joseph Wright, Flickr
3
who were not crushed from flying rocks or buried underneath collapsing building,
died from suffocation due to a lethal cocktail of ash and volcanic gas. And until
now, no one had bothered to challenge that interpretation.
III. A new study, led by volcanologist Giuseppe Mastrolorenzo from the Naples
Observatory in Italy, shows that the residents killed in Pompeii and the neighbo-
ring towns located on the slopes of the volcano died from an extreme heat surge
produced by the volcano, not suffocation. “Everything that has been written in
the guides, and the texts, and that has been re-told to tourists is false”, Mastro-
lorenzo told GlobalPost. Mastrolorenzo points to the piles of human remains as
his leading evidence.
IV. Hundreds of bodies were recovered from the three main cities devastated
by the eruption. Around three quarters of the remains reflect people who were
killed instantaneously, their bodies suspended in action. Victims of suffocation,
in contrast, are generally found in floppy or sleepy positions, crumpled on the
floor. The researchers tested their theory by exposing a set of recent animals
and human bones to different levels of heat, ranging from 100 to 800 degrees
Fahrenheit.
V. Based on the coloration of the experimental bones, they concluded that the bo-
dies in Pompeii, 6.2 miles from the volcano, were likely exposed to temperatures
of between 250 and 300 degrees Fahrenheit. Bodies recovered from towns closer
to the eruption were exposed to much higher temperatures, probably 450 to 500
degrees Fahrenheit, according to the team’s study, which appeared recently in
the journal PLUS One.
VI. Using this information, the team modeled temperature gradients of the six
major flows of hot ash columns that plowed down the side of the mountain du-
ring the eruption. The results suggest that a much wider area around the volcano
can be subjected to lethal temperatures than previously thought.
VII. Mastrolorenzo believes the victims of Pompeii were killed during a single heat
surge from the fourth pyroclastic surge. A few seconds exposure to the intense
heat was enough to kill the villagers immediately. Being inside provided no shel-
ter.
VIII. The blazing heat wave could have traveled up to 12.4 miles from the volcano.
Taking this into account, the current plan to evacuate a five-mile radius around in
the event of another eruption seems entirely insufficient. The city of Napoles sits
outside this zone, for example, but it is only 6.2 miles away.
IX. Potentially more than 3 million people are at risk if Mount Vesuvius explodes
in a similar fashion to the one that wiped out Pompeii.
4
Ejercicio 4. Escribe las palabras clave que localizaste.
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Ejercicio 5. Completa la tabla con los conectores y decide a qué tipo de conexión pertenecen.
CONECTOR TIPO DE CONEXIÓN
Ejercicio 6. Elabora una línea del tiempo de acuerdo a la temporalidad del texto.
Vesubio hace Mastroloren-

erupción zo cree que
murieron
por el calor
generado.
Al terminar
79 BC. el estudio
5
Ejercicio 7. Localiza las palabras subrayadas en el texto y decide a qué o quién hacen referencia.
I) WE
III) HIS
V) THEY
VI) THE TEAM
IX) THE ONE
Ejercicio 8. Decide si los siguientes enunciados son verdaderos (V) o falsos (F). Comenta tus respuestas
con tus compañeros.
V F 1. Las víctimas de Pompeya murieron quemadas por la lava.

V F 2. Después de la erupción se recuperaron miles de cadáveres.
V F 3. Los investigadores pudieron averiguar la temperatura a la que estuvie-
ron expuestos los huesos por su color.
V F 4. Las víctimas que se encontraban en lugares cerrados pudieron prote-
gerse de la erupción.
V F 5. El Vesubio es un volcán peligroso para más personas de las que se
había estimado.
6
TEMA 2: COHERENCIA
Objetivo: Al término de este tema serás capaz de reconocer las funciones de los conectores que unen
ideas en las oraciones..
Seguramente ya estás familiarizado con las palabras de unión, también llamadas conectores y que las hay
de dos tipos: conectores intraoracionales y extraoraciones. Recordarás que los conectores se agrupan por
funciones, y que estas funciones afectan el significado de los enunciados que unen los conectores. Recuer-
da que los conectores pueden unir enunciados dentro de un párrafo o unir los conceptos vertidos
en dos párrafos seguidos. Observa el mapa conceptual:
CONECTORES
INTRAORACIONALES
ADICIÓN CONTRASTE CAUSA ALTERNATIVA EFECTO
and but because accordingly

moreover except for or as a result
furthermore however because of either...or hence
again nonetheless since neither... nor so
besides instead of as otherwise then
in addition on the due to therefore
contrary owing to thus
Observa como en los siguientes párrafos los conectores aparecen en negritas con una función específica:
More than 2,000 years before the arrival of the Spaniards, the ancestors of the Taíno had moved into
the Caribbean archipelago from the northeast coast of mainland South America. They spoke a language
(called Taíno) of the Arawakan family, one of the most widely dispersed languages in South America. By
A.D.700, after occupying the Lesser Antilles and Puerto Rico, they had moved farther into the islands of the
southern Bahamas and the western Greater Antilles—Hispaniola, Jamaica, and Cuba.
The ancestors of the Taíno were people of the tropical forest, who made their living by hunting, fishing,
and collecting wild animals and plants. In the centuries of living in their new home, however, the Taíno
way of life had become distinctively Caribbean. The sea served to unite, rather than separate, the Taíno.
The elaborate oceangoing canoes of the chiefs could hold as many as 100 people, and voyages between
islands were routine.
In addition to intermarriage between high-ranking lineages, the large chiefdoms of Hispaniola and the
other Greater Antilles interacted with one another through a ball game. The Taíno played the game on
large, flat courts lined with stones or earthen embankments. The game was played with a gum rubber ball,
7
which could not be caught or struck by a player’s hands or feet. For the Taíno, the game was much more
than sport: it was a focus for religious festivals, feasting, trade, intermarriage, and the (relatively) peaceful
resolution of conflicts.
Con la información que encontraste tras analizar los conectores, se puede establecer la coherencia que
existe a lo largo del texto, lo que te permite registrar la información contenida en el mismo de manera
ordenada. Ahora puedes unir la información para conocer el encadenamiento de los conceptos del texto.
A continuación se encuentra la tabla de conectores más comunues:
FUNCIONES CONECTORES
again, also, and, as well as, besides, both...and, further, furthermore, in addition to,
ADICIÓN likewise, moreover, similarly, then, too, what is more, as well.
although/though, but, either/neither, except, however, in contrast to, in spite of/despi-

te, nevertheless, notwithstanding, on the contrary, on the one hand/on the other hand,
CONTRASTE
or/nor, otherwise, rather, still/ yet, whereas, even though, while.
as, because of, because, due to the fact (that), due to, on account of, since.
CAUSA
accordingly, as a consequence, as a result, because, consequently, for that reason, give
rise to, hence, as a result of, is/are due to, lead to, produce, result in, so, then, therefo-
EFECTO
re, thus.
after a while, after, afterwards, as soon as, at last, before, during, eventually, ever since,
further, lately, later, next, presently, recently, since then, since, thereafter, until, when,
DE TIEMPO
while,.
CONCLUSIÓN finally, in brief, in conclusion, in short, in sum, in summary, on the whole, to conclude, to
sum up.
CONDICIÓN except that, if/ whether...or not, in case, on condition that, provided that, unless.
EJEMPLIFICA- for example/for instance, in other words, in the same manner, namely, that is, that is to
CIÓN say, to illustrate.
ÉNFASIS actually, as a matter of fact, certainly, in fact, indeed, of course, truly.
PROPÓSITO so that, in order that, in order to, in a hope that.
ENUMERACIÓN first, second, last, the former, the latter, both.

RELACIONES above, beyond, by, far from, far off, in front of, in, into, near, nearby, on, to the left, to
ESPACIALES the right, to, under, up, upon, within without. (En casos especiales se unen elementos
dentro de una oración)
8
COLUMBUS, MY ENEMY
A Caribbean chief resists the first Spanish invaders (Natural History, December 1990)
By Samuel M. Wilson
I. In 1495, Guarionex had witnessed the total devastation the Spaniards could cause in battle. Soon afterward,
however, the foreigners’ ferocity strangely declined. They gave the remaining chiefs remarkable presents—
glass beads, copper bells, brightly colored clothes. Faced with these powerful and unpredictable men, Guario-
nex had agreed that he and his people would be their subjects.
II. From the Spaniards’ signs and the few Taíno words they could speak, Guarionex understood that their lea-
der, Columbus, demanded submission not to himself but to some even more powerful chief who lived on an is-
land of which Guarionex had never heard. Guarionex further agreed that his people would pay tribute in food,
cotton, and gold. To placate the Spaniards, he offered to plant fields stretching for more than 100 miles, from
the north coast of Hispaniola to the south. The Spaniards, however, appeared to want gold more than anything
else: they demanded that every man of fourteen or more years give them one of their little copper bells full
of gold every three months. Gold was relatively plentiful in surface deposits on Hispaniola, and although they
valued it, the Taíno did not mine it extensively.
III. By 1497, after two years of epidemics and famine following the arrival of the Spaniards, the other chiefs
were pushing Guarionex to put up some resistance. The Spaniard Francisco de Roldán led a small army of dis-
satisfied Spaniards; he had told the chief Marque that he would help drive the Spaniards out of Concepción de
la Vega, the fort that controlled the center of the island. Roldán promised that if the Taíno won, the Spaniards
would stop demanding tribute. His offer was attractive to many of the chiefs, most of them subordinate to
Guarionex.
IV. While Guarionex was being pushed into battle by his confederates, Don Bartolomé Colón, Columbus’s
brother, learned of the imminent uprising in La Vega Real. He had heard of Roldán’s plan to join with the Taíno
to take over the fort at Concepción de la Vega. Moving quickly with the 300 Spaniards he had with him, Barto-
lomé came into La Vega Real from the south. His men reinforced the fort, but they were still vastly outmatched
by the surrounding Guarionex-Roldán alliance.
V. As Bartolomé moved into La Vega Real, Guarionex and his confederates were assembling and preparing for
battle. The allied chiefs were scattered in several villages within the central valley. The situation was different
from two years earlier, now the Taíno understood the power of the swords and horses, and the firearms had
lost some of their terror. Moreover, they truly felt that they had no other hope but to defeat the Spaniards.
VI. Bartolomé staged a midnight raid on the surrounding villages. His plan was to capture many of the chiefs
before they could attack in the morning. Small groups of horses rode into the villages and carried off fourteen
chiefs before any defense could be organized. Bartolomé himself went into the large village of Guarionex and
took the chief back to the fort. Five thousand men arrived, all without weapons, wailing and very upset, crying
bitter tears, begging that they be given their king Guarionex and their other leaders, fearing that the caciques
would be killed or burned alive. Don Bartolomé, having compassion for them and seeing their piety for their
natural leaders, and knowing the innate goodness of Guarionex, who was more inclined to put up with and su-
ffer with tolerance the aggravations and injuries done by the Christians, rather than think of or take vengance
9
gave them their king and other leaders. Fate had cast Bartolomé and Guarionex as strange allies, each de-
pendent on the other for his authority and survival.
VII. This partnership, however, was fragile. Famine and disease increased in the villages, and among the Taíno
the feeling of despair continued to grow. Guarionex was unable to protect his people from either the tribute
demands of Columbus and the Crown or the unofficial demands for food and gold made by the anti-Colum-
bus faction of Spaniards.
VIII. Increasingly, Guarionex was viewed as a tool of the Columbus family, and his support from the other
chiefs, from the pro-Roldán faction, and from his own people began to evaporate. He was able to maintain
his position as a powerful chief for little more than a year after the fourteen chiefs had been captured, but
then had to flee La Vega Real with his family.
IX. Even then Guarionex could not find safety, because Bartolomé, fearing that Guarionex would return with
an army, hunted him down in the mountains of northern Hispaniola, where he had sought refuge. Guarionex
and his people had been hidden by Mayobanex, the most powerful chief in the northern mountains and per-
haps a distant kinsman of Guarionex’s. Bartolomé’s capture of Guarionex brought about the destruction of
this chiefdom as well, by the same strategy used elsewhere—capture the chiefs as hostages to be ransomed
(but not released) in exchange for their peoples’ tribute payments. Guarionex was held in chains at Concep-
ción until 1502, when he was sent to Spain. His ship sank in a storm, and he died along with all the ship’s
crew.
Ejercicio 1: Después de haber leído el texto, completa la tabla y compara con tus compañeros.
PÁRRAFO CONECTOR TIPO DE UNIÓN -adicción, contraste, etc) Y CONCEPTO FORMADO
II
III
IV
VI
VII
VIII
IX
10
TEMA 3: ORACIÓN TÓPICO I
Objetivo: Al término de este tema serás capaz de identificar la oración tópico y diferenciarla de los detalles
de apoyo.
Al igual que la lectura de familiarización, la de estudio también tiene varios componentes. Comencemos
por la columna de la derecha. Encontramos primero que debemos reconocer el enunciado tópico. El
enunciado tópico es aquel que contiene el eje conceptual de un párrafo. En este enunciado no encon-
tramos ejemplos, tampoco desarrolla o explica conceptos, lo que es más, en la mayoría de los casos si lo
eliminamos del párrafo no entendemos el resto de la información.
En el mismo párrafo nos encontramos otros enunciados que comúnmente se conocen como detalles de
apoyo; éstos nos dan ejemplos, explicaciones y el desarrollo de los conceptos vertidos en el enunciado
tópico. Aunque es común encontrar el enunciado tópico al principio de un párrafo, esto no es una regla.
Podemos localizar el enunciado tópico en cuatro posiciones diferentes:
Enunciado tópico al principio del párrafo.

Enunciado tópico al final del párrafo.

Enunciado tópico en la parte media.

Enunciado tópico dividido entre el principio y el final del

párrafo.
A veces, un párrafo no tiene detalles de apoyo. Esto sucede cuando el párrafo sólo contiene un enunciado,
o es un resumen de un capítulo o de un artículo científico.
Diagrama de un párrafo sin detalles de apoyo.
Para que tengas una idea de cómo se localiza el enunciado tópico, te presentamos el texto “Genetics”.
11
TEXTO ENUNCIADO TÓPICO
GENETICS
1) The Human Genome Pro-
1) The Human Genome Project is a research ject is a research effort to
effort to analyze de structure of human DNA with analyze de structure of hu-
the aid of powerful computer and determine de man DNA with the aid of
location of the estimated 100,000 human genes. powerful computer and de-
2) It is intended to provide a vital source of infor- termine de location of the
mation for medical science in the 21st century. estimated 100,000 human
3) Begun in 1988, its prime focus was to help us genes.
understand the 4,000 genetic diseases that afflict
mankind. 4) Today however, that original goal DETALLES DE APOYO
has broadened and the database of information
that is being assembled may eventually be put 2) Propósito del proyecto.
to more sinister use. 5) Earlier this year Ian Wil- 3) Objetivos que tenía al prin-
mut successfully cloned a sheep and, for the first cipio
time, the idea of cloning a human individual mo- 4) Objetivos en el presente.
ved from fiction to possibility. 5) Ejemplo de que se preten-
de con el proyecto.
En este párrafo, la oración tópico se encuentra al principio, es el eje conceptual del párrafo porque nos
indica de qué se trata el mismo; en este caso se trata de un estudio para analizar la estructura del DNA,
que lleva por nombre el Proyecto del Genoma Humano.
Las oraciones que siguen amplían la información del enunciado tópico: el segundo enunciado nos dá el
propósito del proyecto, el tercero nos dice los objetivos que tenía al principio, el cuarto nos habla de los
objetivos en el presente, el quinto nos da un ejemplo de que se pretende con el proyecto. Como verás,
todas estas oraciones son apoyo de la primera, porque nos
explican qué es el Proyecto Genoma Humano.
Lee los siguientes textos y responde los ejercicios que les siguen.
Ejercicio 1. En equipo localicen la oración tópico e identifiquen el contenido de los detalles de apoyo.
12
LETTER WRITING
1) Forrester Research says 15% of the US popula-

tion now uses e-mail, up from 2% in 1992.
2) And they predict that within five years that
number will rise to about 50%. 3) This is not seen
as good news by educationalists and historians.
4) Thanks to new technology the art of traditio-
nal letter writing is being lost. 5) It has been taken
over by the fax, the telephone and, increasingly,
e-mail. 6) Dr. Lance Workman, a psychologist at DETALLES DE APOYO
the University of Glamorgan, shares the worries
of many in thinking that as technology takes over
from the pen, schoolchildren may lose the physical
and literary skills of writing. 7) Historians, biogra-
phers and critics are also worried as the death of
the letter means they will lose one of the main re-
sources they have to discover how people live and
what they think.
INFORMATION AT YOUR
FINGERTIPS
1) Able to store entire encyclopedias on one sil-

very disk, the CD stores the information as tiny pits
in its surface, which are read by a laser beam. 2)
Modern computers can retrieve the information
almost immediately and allow the user to move DETALLES DE APOYO
between different sections with ease. 3) Invented
by Philips in the late Seventies, the compact disc is
a new type of hi-fi system. 4) The CD has shown it-
self to be the most significant development in data
storage since the invention of the printed book.
13
VIRTUAL CONFERENCING
1) A study produced by the California State Universi-

ty claims that students learning in a virtual classroom
are already testing 20% better that those students
taught in a traditional classroom. 2) Attaching a ca-
mera and microphone to your PC is now an easy and DETALLES DE APOYO
relatively inexpensive upgrade and makes video con-
ferencing available to all.
3) Already the impact of video conferencing has re-
duced the need for many business trips. 4) It has also
suggested the way forward for education. 5) Peter
Drucker, an American management consultant, be-
lieves that remote conferencing will soon bring an
end to universities.

SOCIAL RELATIONS ON THE NET
1) Ian Pearson, a futurologist at British Telecom,

says that due to the net, face-to-face contact with
our work colleagues and a lot of our social contacts
will disappear. 2) In fact, we won’t actually become
friendless.
3) Instead, it is likely that people will form virtual
friendships with others working in the same field
or with similar interests. DETALLES DE APOYO
4)This is already happening in the US, where you
now find local communities setting up virtual net-
works allowing people living in the same area to
get to know local people down the street via their
PCs. 5) There is a downside to all this, though. In
one case in the US a woman met a man over the
internet and married him only to discover that “he”
was in fact a “she.” 6) Experts believe that the net
will produce radical changes in our social relation-
ships.
14
INTERNET ECONOMICS
1) “Just as the Industrial Revolution changed manu-

facturing capacity, the Internet will change distribu-
tion. 2) Middle men and middle-level companies will
be eliminated.”
3) Says Shinkhar Ghosh, chairman of the american
software house Open Market Inc. 4) But industry
executives are convinced that it will bring a funda- DETALLES DE APOYO
mental change to the world economy, possibly in
only a few years. 5) Most obviously, the net allows
any company to have a genuinely global presence
with only handful of employees.
6) They will no longer need to employ agents or re-
presentatives in other countries. 7) The Internet has
to overcome legal, regulatory and security problems
before it can really work as a site for electronic com-
merce.

COMPUTER CRIME
1) Computer crime has been the growth industry of

the past decade. 2) The vulnerability of computer
security was demonstrated last March when a 17-
year-old english schoolboy was arrested for hacking
into the Department of Defense’s computer in the
Pentagon and “doing more damage than the KGB did DETALLES DE APOYO
in twenty years.”
3) But computers are also a powerful weapon in
the fight against crime and are used extensively by
the police. 4) As banks rarely publicize their losses
through computer fraud, estimates of the money
that is being stolen vary widely. 5) But there is no
doubt that unscrupulous commuter hackers are get-
ting away with millions.
15
TEMA 4: ORACIÓN TÓPICO II
Objetivo: Al término de este tema serás capaz de identificar la oración tópico en los párrafos de un texto de
mediana longitud y sintetizarla.
En la unidad anterior estudiaste la oración tópico y los detalles de apoyo, aprendiste que la oración tópico
es el eje conceptual del párrafo y que la información que amplía, desarrolla y ejemplifica son los detalles
de apoyo. Cuando el desarrollo del eje conceptual es amplio o complicado puede ser necesario utilizar más
de un párrafo que lo apoye; en este caso tenemos párrafos que carecen de oración tópico y, por lo tanto,
dependen de la oración tópico que los origina. Cuando esto sucede decimos que el texto tiene párrafos
dependientes del párrafo que contiene a la oración tópico.
Ejemplos de este caso se pueden encontrar en el texto: Is the universe against you?
I. Murphy’s Law states that If something can go wrong, it will. If there are two
or more ways of doing something and one of them can lead to catastrophe, then
someone will do it.
II. Scientists dismiss it as nothing more than a product of memory when things
don’t go well, but the most famous manifestations of Murphy’s law have a scien-
tific basis. Butter-down landings are always the result of gravity and surface fric-
tion.
Como se puede apreciar, el segundo párrafo no tiene oración tópico, es el desarrollo y ejemplo de la Ley
de Murphy y es considerado párrafo dependiente.
Ejercicio 1. Localiza los párrafos dependientes y las oraciones tópico.
WHAT’S RIGHT ABOUT BEING LEFT HANDED
I. Imagine you are Alice, stepping through the looking glass. Suddenly everything
is reversed. Doorknobs are on the wrong side of doors. The gearshift in your car
is in the wrong place. Handles on can openers are on the wrong side and turn the
wrong way.
II. Twenty-five million Americans wake up every day in just such a predicament.
They are the one in ten of us who are left-handed and must face the built-in vias of
a world designed for the right-handed majority. In a society of rights (from Anglo-
Saxon right, for “direct, up-right, correct”) and righteousness, the southpaw is
left (Anglo-Saxon lyft for “weak”) with leftovers and left-handed compliments.
III. Why we are left- or right- handed remains one of the great-unsolved myste-
ries of science. We know that nearly two of three lefties are male and that left-
handedness runs in families. According to one study, almost half the offspring of
two left-handed parents will be southpaws. The Scots-Irish family Kerr (from the
Gaelic word for “left”) produced so many left-handers that in 1470 the family built
its castle’s spiral stairways with a reverse twist to favor southpaw swordsmen.
16
IV. On the other hand, heredity alone cannot explain lefties. At least 84 percent
of them are born of two right-handed parents. And in 12 percent of genetically
identical twins, one will be right-handed, the other left.
V. Perhaps the greatest puzzle of all is not why some people are left-handed, but
rather why so few are. In virtually every other species, from chimpanzees to chin-
chillas, roughly equal numbers of individuals will favor either the right or the left.
However, scientists are trying to set things right, and they are beginning to gain
insight into the many ways southpaws differ from north paws, by considering how
their brains work.
VI. Broadly speaking, the left side of the brain is thought by some scientists to pro-
cess linear, logical information, while the right side tends more towards proces-
sing emotion and mood. Indeed, the ability to integrate what some researchers
call the more “logical” left side of the brain and the more “intuitive” or “artistic”
right side may have helped lefties excel in many fields.
VII. Though most people believe that handedness is a simple either/or proposi-
tion, this is incorrect. Handedness is a spectrum. Chances are that you are more
nearly ambidextrous than you realize. For example, you can probably write quite
well with your left hand even if you have always been right-handed.
VIII. To find out, take a large piece of paper, turned sideways, and pick up a pen-
cil in each hand. With your right hand, slowly sign your name, and with your
left hand match each movement in reserve, with both hands moving in opposite
directions away from the paper’s center. After a few tries, hold your left-handed
reverse signature up to a mirror. You’ll be surprised how much it resembles your
forward right-handed writing.
Ejercicio 2. Completa la tabla con la información que se te solicita, en caso de que el párrafo no cuente
con oración tópico, márcalo como dependiente y señala el párrafo del que depende.
Párrafo Oración tópico Detalle de Contenido

apoyo
II
III
17
IV
VI
VII
VIII
Seguramente notaste que todas las oraciones tópico son la primera del párrafo. Esto tiene que ver con
el estilo del autor, ya que generalmente siguen un patrón a lo largo del texto, así que si encuentras dos o
tres párrafos con la oración tópico en el mismo lugar, hay altas probabilidades de que todo el texto siga el
mismo modelo.
Ejercicio 3. Decide si los siguientes enunciados son verdaderos (V) o falsos (F). Comenta tus respuestas
con tus compañeros.
V F 1. Los zurdos en Norteamérica representan el 20% de la población.
V F 2. La herencia es uno de los factores que explica la lateralidad de una

persona.
V F 3. En el reino animal, sólo los chimpancés tienen la característica de
tener lateralidad izquierda (zurdo) o derecha (diestro).
V F 4. Hay menos mujeres zurdas que hombres en el mundo.
V F 5. Los zurdos difícilmente pueden utilizar su mano derecha para reali-
zar todo tipo de tareas.
18
TEMA 5: DEPENDENCIA DE PÁRRAFO
Objetivo: Al término de este tema serás capaz de reconocer en un texto la oración tópico e identificar los
párrafos que dependen de ésta.
Cuando estudiamos la oración tópico y los detalles de apoyo, aprendimos que la oración tópico es el eje
conceptual del párrafo y que la información que amplía, desarrolla y ejemplifica son los detalles de apoyo.
Cuando el desarrollo del eje conceptual es amplio o complicado puede ser necesario utilizar más de un
párrafo que lo apoye; en este caso tenemos párrafos que carecen de oración tópico, y por tanto dependen
de la oración tópico que los origina. Cuando esto sucede decimos que el texto tiene párrafos dependientes
del párrafo que contiene a la oración tópico.
LECTURA ANALÍTICA
por medio de compuestas

por ENUNCIADO
a partir TÓPICO
DISCRIMINACIÓN de
INFORMACIÓN IDEAS PRINCIPALES
DETALLES DE
RELEVANTE
APOYO
PÁRRAFO
DEPENDIENTE
DE PÁRRAFO
conforman la
IDEA CENTRAL
se expresan en
forma de
NOTAS, RESUMEN
O ALGÚN TIPO DE
SÍNTESIS
Ejemplos de este caso se pueden encontrar en el siguiente extracto del texto, Is the universe against
you?
I. Murphy’s Law states that if something can go wrong, it will. If there are two
or more ways of doing something and one of them can lead to catastrophe, then
someone will do it.
19
II. Scientists dismiss it as nothing more than a product of memory when things
don’t go well, but the most famous manifestations of Murphy’s Law have a scien-
tific basis. Butter-down landings are always the result of gravity and surface fric-
tion.
Como se puede apreciar, el segundo párrafo no tiene oración tópico, es el desarrollo y ejemplos de la Ley
de Murphy.
LOCALIZACIÓN DE SUBTEMAS
Un lector hábil posee muchos recursos para entender y ordenar la información. Una forma de saber el
contenido de un texto es ubicar los subtemas de que se compone. Un texto largo se compone de varios
subtemas, éstos pueden presentarse de manera lineal o dispersos en el texto: pero podemos localizarlos si
nos guiamos por las oraciones tópico e ideas principales.
LOCALIZACIÓN
DE SUBTEMAS
se localizan
ORACIÓN TÓPICO más DETALLES DE

APOYO
PÁRRAFO
DEPENDIENTE
es
que
NÚCLEO
CONCEPTUAL DEL DESARROLLAN
PÁRRAFO EXPLICAN
EJEMPLIFICAN
forman BLOQUE DE forman

INFORMACIÓN
representa
SUBTEMA
EN EL TEXTO
Cuando los subtemas dentro de un texto se encuentran dispersos, se toman todas las ideas principales
relacionadas con el tema y se integran.
Lee el siguiente texto que está conformado por los subtemas de:
20
1. SÍNTOMAS
2. ORIGEN DEL PROBLEMA
3. GRUPOS AFECTADOS
4. TRATAMIENTO
5. PREVENCIÓN
Ejercicio 1. Localiza las ideas principales y decide a que subtema pertenecen.
LEAD POISONING: THE SILENT EPIDEMIC

IT CAN BE IN THE WATER WE DRINK, THE FOOD WE EAT, EVEN THE DUST IN
OUR HOMES.
Condensed from DISCOVER MICHAEL WEISSKOPH
I. MAURICE SANDERS and his wife, Judy, were worried. Their ten-month-old twins,
Olivia and Abigail, had virtually stopped growing and suffered from constipation,
insomnia and crankiness. Then a routine blood test yielded a surprising result: the
girls had lead poisoning.
II. Their parents were shocked. Wasn’t lead poisoning an affliction of inner-city
children who chew on peeling lead paint? How had their daughters, living in an
affluent part of Washington, D.C., become contaminated?
III. The couple spent $4500 to strip and repaint their house and replace the dry-
wall ceilings. But the children’s high lead count persisted. Finally, a test of the
family’s tap water showed lead levels nearly four times higher than the 50 parts
per billion the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) then considered safe.
IV. Without realizing it, the Sanders family had become part of a silent epidemic of
alarming proportions. According to a growing body of medical research, millions
of Americans, most of them children, are suffering from low-level lead poisoning.
New studies point to serious physical and intellectual impairment in children with
only small amounts of lead in their blood --amounts below the level presently
considered safe by the Centers for disease Control (CDC). Moreover, this wides-
pread contamination springs not just from peeling paint of tap water, but also
from such sources as food we eat, dust in our homes and dirt in our yards.
V. Three groups are especially vulnerable: children between ages five months and
six years; fetuses, for whom lead intake by the mother means a greater chance
of miscarriage, premature delivery, stillbirth and birth defects; and middle-aged
men, whose risk of hypertension rises along with blood lead levels.
VI. At least 17 percent of urban preschool children have unsafe blood lead levels.
This makes them susceptible to psychological, neurological, kidney and blood ab-
normalities, including partial hearing loss, slower neural transmission, hyperacti-
vity, learning disabilities and lower I.Q.
VII. In the 1970s, the government took steps to control sources of lead contami-
21
nation. Congress passed legislation to ban, in effect, the sale of leaded paint for
residential use, and to develop procedures for removing old paint from old hou-
sing. The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) encouraged the food industry to
discontinue using lead solder in food cans. And the EPA ordered oil companies to
start phasing out lead additives in gasoline.
VIII. The effect of these actions was dramatic. IN the early 1980s, the National
Health and Nutrition Examination Survey found a 37- percent drop in average U.S.
blood lead levels from 1976 through 1980. But even more dramatic was the dis-
covery of how big a problem remained. About half the adults and 88 percent of
the preschool children tested had high blood lead levels. And 9.1 percent of the
children met the current CDC criteria for lead poisoning. The numbers were even
more alarming for black children: nearly a quarter were lead poisoned, and 97.5
percent reached or exceeded the danger level.
IX. The hunt for the cause of this persistent contaminating has touched all the
usual places. Gasoline still spews enough lead into the air to cause an estimated
123,000 cases of high blood pressure a year. Lead paint still covers the interiors of
25 to 30 million housing units.
X. But, unexpectedly, a primary cause turns out to be tap water. Forty-two million
people ―one out of every five Americans served by public water systems― con-
sume dangerous amounts of lead in their household drinking water. The problem
seems to lie not in municipal treatment plants or public distribution lines, but in
residential plumbing systems, where water collects small particles corroded from
lead pipes or, more often, lead solder in copper pipes.
XI. Another source of low-level lead poisoning is plain old dirt. Auto emissions,
flaking paint and smelters left a legacy of four million to five million metric tons of
lead in dust and soil.
XII. Denise Wadleigh of Jersey City, N.J., bought a home in a middle class residen-
tial neighborhood near a major highway. Less than a year later a routine blood
test showed that Wadleigh’s two-year-old son was suffering from lead poisoning.
A scientist from Rutgers University analyzed the back-yard dirt and found lead le-
vels 85 times higher than average. “We had to spend six thousand dollar to cover
the yard with concrete”, Wadleigh reports.
XIII. Powder-fine outdoor dirt sifts inside to become household dust, presenting a
danger to children who crawl on the floor. Such dust can also contaminate fresh
vegetables and fruits. Other, less wide spread contributors include lead cooking
utensils and lead-bearing fertilizers and agricultural chemicals. Even dinner pla-
tes, cups and glasses pose a danger. Atoms of toxic lead can dissolve from the
glaze of imported ceramic-ware that hasn’t been fired at the high temperatures
legally required in the United Sates.
XIV. Don and Fran Wallace of Seattle learned this the hard way. In 1978, when Don
was an Air Force lieutenant coronel stationed in Italy, the couple bought a set of
22
terra-cotta dishes in a small village. Soon after the purchase Don became uncha-
racteristically irritable and aggressive. He lost more than 30 pounds and suffered
from insomnia and pains in his wrists and forearms. Fran became gravely ill with
body aches, anemia and dehydration. The two were found to be severely poiso-
ned. The source: a set of Italian coffee mugs that, tests showed, released over
300 times more lead than FDA standards permit. Imports account for some 50
percent of U.S. ceramic-chinaware sales, and the FDA has stepped up inspection
of foreign-made dishes.
XV. How much led is harmful? Until the 1970s, exposure to lead was considered
dangerous only at blood levels associated with extreme symptoms of poisoning:
convulsions, brain swelling, acute kidney disease, stomach pains and hallucina-
tions. But as the case of the Sanders twins shows, low-level lead poisoning can
cause symptoms that, while subtler, are no less serious. As a result, the CDC
has continually lowered the point at which patients should be treated for lead
poising.
XVI. The first influential study of lead’s low-level effects was published in 1979 by
Herbert Needleman, now professor of psychiatry at the University of Pittsburgh
Medical School. Testing first and second grade students in the Boston area, he
found the lowest I.Q., academic achievement, language skills and attention span
among children with the highest tooth levels of lead. None of their lead levels ex-
ceeded the CDC’s 1979 toxicity threshold. Says Paul Mushak, adjunct professor at
the University of North Carolina and an expert on toxic substances, “Our children
and people in risk groups shouldn’t be held hostage to a preventable disease”.
XVII. What can be done? In some cases the treatment for low-level lead poisoning
can be as simple as removing the source of pollution. For Olivia and Abigail San-
ders, that was enough. Their symptoms began to abate two months after they
stopped drinking tap water. But no one knows what the long-term effects of lead
poisoning may be. The small amount of research done so far suggests that inte-
llectual impairment may be irreversible.
XVIII. Nor is it always easy to know what water is safe. Jeanne Briskin, a policy
analyst with the EPA, reports that in uncounted schools across the country, water
in drinking fountains may be lead-contaminated. Even the child whose parents
have removed the lead threat at home may still be gulping the metal every school
day.
XIX. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children be screened

for lead poisoning at 12 months of age, with their doctor to determine follow-up
examinations; men a risk for hypertension should also have their blood lead levels
tested.
XX. Prevention is even more important. Public-health specialists have intensified

efforts to control the pollutant. Meanwhile, for the individual, that means testing
potential household sources of contamination:
23
XXI. Have the paint chips in your home tested by your local country health de-
partment. If they contain lead, remove the paint with a chemical stripper. San-
ding is not recommended, because it releases lead-bearing dust into the air. And
don’t use a heat gun, which torches the lead into toxic fumes.
XXII. Test your tap water from a first draw-water that’s been sitting in the pipes all
night-and again during the day. Your city or county water department will usually
do the testing or direct you to an appropriate private laboratory. If there is lead
in the line, replace the joints and pipes with copper or plastic, depending on your
building code. A stopgap remedy: run the tap water for three minutes before
using it, to flush out accumulated contaminants. Also, use water only from the
cold-water tap for drinking, cooking and for making baby formula. Hot water is
likely to contain more dissolved lead.
XXIII. Finally, beware of imported ceramic dinnerware. Consumers can purchase a

simple home testing kit to check.
Ejercicio 2. Contesta las siguientes preguntas.
1. ¿En qué productos encontramos el plomo que es nocivo para la salud?

__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
2. ¿Cuál es el procedimiento para tratar el envenenamiento por plomo?

__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
3. ¿Cuáles son los síntomas del envenenamiento por plomo?

__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
4. ¿A qué personas afecta el plomo?

__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
5. ¿Cuáles son los daños provocados por el plomo?

__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
24
6. ¿Qué instituciones se han involucrado en este problema?
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
7. ¿Qué medidas preventivas se recomiendan para evitar el envenenamiento por

plomo?.
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
Ejercicio 3. Completa la tabla con datos concretos de cada subtema y ubica el párrafo en donde se en-
cuentra.
TEMA 1 TEMA 2 TEMA 3 TEMA 4 TEMA 5
Síntomas Origen del Grupos Tratamiento Prevención

problema afectados
25
TEMA 6: IDEA PRINCIPAL
Objetivo: Al término de este tema serás capaz de identificar la idea principal por medio de la localización y
síntesis de la oración tópico y los detalles de apoyo.
La oración tópico se puede localizar fácilmente en un párrafo porque es el eje conceptual del mismo. Una
vez que tenemos la oración tópico y los detalles de apoyo seleccionados estamos listos para redactar la
idea principal.
Se tiene una idea principal por cada oración tópico que encontramos, porque los componentes de la idea
principal son la oración tópico y los detalles de apoyo. Esto no quiere decir que se copie el párrafo com-
pleto; es necesario un proceso de selección que elimine todo aquello que articula la oración tópico y los
detalles de apoyo.
Cuando escribimos oraciones utilizamos elementos, que aunque no son del todo necesarios, las hacen
atractivas al lector. Sin embargo, al redactar una idea principal, sólo utilizamos la información indispensa-
ble de la oración tópico y los detalles de apoyo para formular una oración sintética.
Los detalles de apoyo se pueden sintetizar fácilmente al buscar palabras generalizadoras que abarquen
varios términos, además de que comúnmente no se registran ni ejemplos, ni estadísticas u otros elementos
no indispensables; pues de ser necesario, siempre se pueden recuperar del texto leído.
Las ideas principales son elementos muy útiles para trabajar diversos tipos de síntesis, como
resúmenes o cuadros sinópticos.
IDEA PRINCIPAL
ORACIÓN TÓPICO
PÁRRAFO
DEPENDIENTE DE
contiene
PÁRRAFO
cuando
DETALLES DE APOYO
CONCEPTOS SE EXPLICAN
EN VARIOS PÁRRAFOS
son
SE REDACTA A PARTIR DE LA
INFORMACIÓN DEL PÁRRAFO
DETALLES DE
características APOYO
características
SÍNTESIS DE LA ORACIÓN TÓPICO se integran a
Y LOS DETALLES DE APOYO FORMAN PARTE
DE LA IDEA
PRINCIPAL
26
Para ejemplificar el proceso tomaremos el primer párrafo del artículo Time Sheets que se presenta a con-
tinuación:
TEXTO ORACIÓN TÓPICO
BOOKS IN BRIEF
LAURENCE A. MARSCHALL
TIME SHEETS
Calendarical confusions from
Julius Caesar to Y2K
1) Like channel markers form a river, calen- 1) Like channel markers form a river,
dars are human inventions, determined to calendars are human inventions,
reveal—or perhaps impose—a pattern in the determined to reveal—or perhaps
flow of time. 2) The numerous attempts to impose—a pattern in the flow of
make a calendar have never been entirely sa- time.
tisfactory, but they have generated some re-
markable exercises in human ingenuity, and DETALLES DE APOYO
the commands of the local calendar have
shaped commerce, culture and science since 2) Las dificultades de hacer un ca-
the earliest historical times. lendario.
3) E.G. Richard´s compendious history of the 3) Contenido del libro de Richard’s
calendar reflects the huge range of the sub-
ject, connecting topics as diverse as the ori-
gin of writing, the French Revolution, Hindu
astronomy and various proposals for a thir-
teen-month year.
La localización de la oración tópico y los detalles de apoyo son procesos que ya has practicado. Para obte-
ner la idea principal se conjuntan estos elementos en una oración representativa del contenido del párrafo,
pero concisa:
Reseña de un libro que habla de la historia del calendario como un invento hu-
mano que ha tropezado con dificultades.
Lee el texto completo y responde los ejercicios que le siguen.
Ejercicio 1. Redacta en español las ideas principales.
27
BOOKS IN BRIEF
Laurence A. Marschall
Time Sheets
Calendarical confusions from
Julius Caesar to Y2K
MAPPING TIME: THE CALENDAR AND ITS HISTORY

by E. G. Richards
I. Like channel markers form a river, calendars are human inventions, determined
to reveal—or perhaps impose—a pattern in the flow of time. The numerous at-
tempts to make a calendar have never been entirely satisfactory, but they have
generated some remarkable exercises in human ingenuity; and the commands of
the local calendar have shaped commerce, culture and science since the earliest
historical times. E. G. Richards’s compendious history of the calendar reflects the
infinite range of the subject, connecting topics as diverse as the origin of writing,
the French Revolution, Hindu astronomy and various proposals for a thirteen-
month year.
II. It is not easy to make a calendar because time vigorously resists being restric-
ted. Although repetitive cycles such as day and night, the phases of the moon, the
patterns of the seasons remain at hand, none of them are really constant. The
day, for instance, changes in length, not only from season to season, but it is also
gradually increasing about half a millisecond per century due to the friction of
tides on the ocean bottom.
III. What’s worse, nothing divides evenly into anything else, If you express a year
in days you have six hours left over. If you express a lunar month in weeks there
are lost days and hours that have to be forced down into the next cycle.
IV. A given date doesn’t fall on the same day of the week from one year to the next.
The phases of the moon wander around the months so calendar makers have to
add a leap day now and again to make the seasons agree with the calendar.
V. Ideally, a mathematician might be able to devise a perfect calendar. But of

course that’s not how calendars come into being. The making of time has evolved
the way species do, by gradual adjustments; historically, new calendars have been
invented whenever the deficits of the old calendars became too pronounced.
VI. Julius Caesar’s calendar, for instance, added a leap day every four years to keep
everything on schedule, but still increased about eleven minutes on the solar year
with each passing year. By 1582 the first day of spring was falling ten days ahead.
Pope Gregory XIII, following the recommendations of astronomers, issued a papal
bull that year declaring the elimination of leap days from three out of every four
century years. Specifically 1700, 1800 and 1900 (but not 2000). That seemed no
great loss, but Gregory also dropped ten days from the current year to bring the
28
seasons back in line. For creditor with bills due from October 5 to October 14,
1582, the decree was no doubt a source of great distress, and some European na-
tions unwilling to take orders from the pope, did not adopt the reform for centu-
ries. Russia remained on the Julian calendar until the 1917 revolution; as a result,
the Imperial Russian Olympic team arrived almost two weeks late for the London
games in 1908.
VII. Richards, formerly a senior lecturer in the biophysics department at King’s

College, University of London, has written perhaps the most complete and lively
treatise on temporal tradition published this millennium. There’s a chapter on the
origin of the week that needs at least a week’s study, and three full chapters on
the dating of Easter. Best of all, more than fifty pages are devoted to algorithms
that convert one calendar system to another.
VIII. The latter, is seems to me offers an ideal way to deal with the year 2000
computer disaster intimidating at midnight this coming December 31. Following
Richard’s suggestions, you can convert your date book to a calendar in which the
year 2000 doesn’t exist. If that fails, and Western civilization collapses overnight,
you will at least have a delightful and absorbing book to read among the ruins.
January – February 1999 ― THE SCIENCES.
1.¿Qué dificultades enfrenta quien intenta hacer un calendario?

__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
2.Explica por qué los calendarios actuales son inexactos.

__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
3.¿Por qué el Papa Gregorio XIII recorrió los días del calendario entonces existen-
te?
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
4.¿Qué suceso fue afectado debido a ese cambio?

__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
5.¿Qué parte del libro comentado puede resolver el problema de las computado-
ras al llegar el año 2000?
__________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________
29
TEMA 7: IDEA CENTRAL
Objetivo: Al término de este tema serás capaz de identificar las ideas principales de un texto para sinteti-
zarlas en un enunciado que representeel eje conceptual del texto.
Uno de los ejercicios más practicados durante el nivel dos de este curso fue seguramente la elaboración
de la idea central. Por ser este un tema de gran importancia, ya que permite aprender a generalizar con-
ceptos, te volvemos a presentar el mapa conceptual correspondiente. Úsalo como referencia para que
redactes la idea central correspondiente al texto “Our Durable Planet”. Comenta la información en grupo.
IDEA CENTRAL
se obtiene por
LECTURA DE ESTUDIO
para localizar
ENUNCIADOS TÓPICO
se forman que ubican
IDEAS PRINCIPALES BLOQUES DE INFORMACIÓN
permiten construir
UN ENUNCIADO CONCISO
USANDO LOS CONCEPTOS LOCALIZADOS
SURVEY 20th CENTURY
Our durable planet

11th September 1999
Search archive
I. “The world’s environment is surprisingly healthy. Discuss with your classmates and
provide valid arguments.” If that were an examination topic, most students would
tear it apart, offering a long list of laments: from local smog to global climate change,
30
from the felling of forests to the spread of roads and cities, from poisonous harbors
to the extinction of species. The list would largely be accurate, the concern legitima-
te. Yet the students who should be given the highest marks would actually be those
who agreed with the statement. The surprise is how good things are, not how bad.
II. After all, the world’s population has more than trebled during this century, and
world output has risen hugely, so you would expect the earth itself to have been
affected. Indeed, if people lived, consumed and produced things in the same way
as they did in 1900 (or 1950, or indeed 1980), the world by now would be a pretty
disgusting place: smelly, unsanitary, toxic and dangerous.
III. But they don’t. The reasons why they don’t, and why the environment has not
been turned to rack and ruin, have to do with prices, technological innovation, social
change and, in democracies, government regulation in response to popular pressure.
That is why today’s environmental problems in the poor countries ought, in principle,
to be solvable.
IV. Raw materials have not run out, and show no sign of doing so. Logically, one day
they must: the planet is a finite place. Yet it is also very big, and man is very inge-
nious. What has happened is that every time a material seems to be running short,
the price has risen and, in response, people have looked for new sources of supply,
tried to find ways to use less of the material, or looked for a substitute. For this rea-
son prices for energy and for minerals have fallen in real terms during the century.
The same is true for food. Prices fluctuate, in response to harvests, natural disasters
and political instability; and when they rise, it takes some time before new sources
of supply become available. But they always do, assisted by new farming and crop
technology.
The long-term trend has been downwards.
V. It is where prices and markets do not operate properly that this benign trend be-
gins to stumble, and the genuine problems arise. Markets cannot always keep the
environment healthy. If no one owns the resource concerned, no one has an interest
in conserving it or fostering it: fish is the best example of this. Markets also fail if the
damaging activity is not captured by a price but rather is shared by society: pollution,
whether of air, ground or water, is the main example of where, as a result, corporate
and social interests collide.
VI. Such cases are not easy to deal with. It is hard to compare the social benefit of
environmental protection with the cost of that protection; hard to judge the best
way for governments to intervene; hard to be sure, in some cases, even of the facts,
such as the rate of species loss or of deforestation, let alone how to interpret them.
VII. Yet, for all that, the record in the rich countries this century is good. Once an
issue has been identified, and electorates and governments have become convinced
that something ought to be done, something has been done. The oldest and worst
sources of air pollution—sulphur dioxide and smoke particles—have been brought
steadily under control (see chart), ending 300 years of deterioration. So have levels
31
of lead in the air. The only exception is that vehicle emissions of some pollutants have
stayed high as petrol consumption has outpaced the effect of tighter controls. Howe-
ver, water, whether in rivers or the sea, has become far cleaner since the 1950s, as
governments have increasingly insisted on waste water being treated before release.
VIII. In other words, the experience of this century has been the opposite of that
claimed by many environmen-talists. Where most of the economic growth has ocu-
rred—the rich countries—the environment has become cleaner and healthier. It is in
the poor countries, where growth has been generally meager, that air and water po-
llution is an increasing hazard to health. For such countries, the issue is not whether
environmental problems can be solved, but how to make sure that they are when it
is in the national interest to do so.
Poor man’s burden
IX. One of the blockages is knowledge. Governments, whether in the rich world or
the poor, are not philosopher kings, able effortlessly to assess pollution problems
and to calculate finely the best way to solve them. So the best solutions have been
ones that have tried to use markets and price signals, generally through taxes, to al-
ter behavior. Such solutions offer a chance to experiment and to see how people and
firms react, rather than simply slapping down a law or regulation and sitting back to
watch what happens.
X. People’s behavior is often not what the philosopher kings expect. When Mexico
tried in 1989 to deal with air pollution by banning certain types of car on particular
days of the week, many people reacted by buying a second, older (and therefore
more polluting) car that could be used on those days. Bans and rules anyway have a
habit of attracting a more pernicious sort of price signal, corruption. A quicker way
for a government to improve its environment is to examine its list of subsidies. Arti-
ficially cheap water and energy, as well as tax breaks for mining, are scourges of the
environment worldwide.
XI. Which, however, gets to the heart of the matter. The real difficulty has lain in
reconciling the differing interests and views involved. You can be green if you de-
prive farmers of their subsidized water, but they will complain. You can be green if
you force companies to bear the cost of installing anti-pollution equipmentin their
factories, but they will protest, or try to bribe officials not to enforce the law, or will
lay off workers. In dealing with these trade-offs, the poor countries’ problem is more
political than economic. Few poor countries are democracies, and few of those are
fully-fledged ones, with broad equality of power and genuine accountability.
XII. The improvement in rich countries’ environment has been closely correlated
with the growth of democracy in those countries. The first stringent anti-pollution
laws were passed in the 1950s, when democracy was blossoming. Japan was hit by
the dreadful Mina Mata disease, caused by mercury poisoning, in the late 1950s;
that, and a series of other pollution disasters, gave rise first to citizens’ protest mo-
vements, and then, belatedly, to new laws to control toxic effluent and air pollution.
In their imperfect way, democracies are able to give voice to the social costs of dirt
32
and danger. That is not true for authoritarian governments that can afford to turn a
blind eye to pollution.
XIII. The rich democracies do have a special problem of their own, which sometimes
harms the poor too. It is that in recent years the debate on environmental issues has
often been hijacked by green pressure groups, because the media and its reading or
watching public is more suspicious of government, of scientists and of companies
than it is of pressure groups. This hijacking tends to exaggerate the dangers, inviting
Draconian solutions.
XIV. For example, acid rain was said to be killing developed countries’ forests; but
according to the World Resources Institute in Washington, DC, Europe’s forest cover
actually grew by 0.3% a year in 1990-95, and North America’s by 0.2% a year. The
Amazon, it was claimed, was being cleared at a rapid rate; it was, but at less than half
the advertised rate. The WRI says Brazil’s total forest cover shrank by 0.5% a year in
1990-95, the same as that of South America as a whole.
XV. Climate change is the biggest of these cases of environmental hijacking, although
so far the pressure groups have been pretty unsuccessful in forcing governments
to take drastic action. Perhaps that is just as well, because scientific estimates of
the rate of climate change have steadily been downgraded. They remain in dou-
bt, although the balance of probability has moved towards a belief that a modest
amount of global warming is under way.
XVI. In democracies, politicians have resisted Draconian measures, on this issue as

on others, because they shrink from the idea of imposing real costs during their time
in office for potential benefits later. That instinct faces a tough test, however, from
everybody’s favorite toy: the motorcar.
En este texto se tratan tres graves problemas, tanto para las potencias como para los países en vías de de
sarrollo: las materias primas, la conservación del medio ambiente y el calentamiento del planeta. ¿Se encuen-
tra en el tratamiento de alguno de estos temas?
Ejercicio 1. Contesta las siguientes preguntas. Comenta con tus compañeros las respuestas.

a) ¿Cúal es el tema prioritario?

b) ¿Cómo afecta tanto a las potencias como a los países pobres?

c) ¿Qué medidas se llevan a cabo para resolverlo?

d) ¿Qué tan eficaces resultan dichas medidas?

33
Ejercicio 2. Completa la tabla con la información que se te solicita.
AFECTACIÓN MEDIDAS RESULTADOS
desarrollados
Países
34
Países en vías
de desarrollo
35
TEMA 8: PALABRA CLAVE
Objetivo: Al término de este tema serás capaz de identificar aquellas palabras que te permitan identificar el
campo semántico en el que se encuentran.
En el nivel 1 del curso de Comprensión de Lectura, se desarrolló el tema de palabra clave; ahora puedes
delimitar el campo semántico de los nominadores que aparecen en el texto. Las palabras clave a nivel
semántico son nominadores (sustantivos), pero no son un solo nominador, siempre son pequeños grupos
de palabras, que suelen tener un descriptor y que, si se sacan del texto, tienen significado propio. Para
que una palabra sea clave, ésta, dentro de su campo semántico, debe estar presente a lo largo del texto.
Si no es así, realmente no son palabras clave, sino alguna aclaración o digresión que el autor hace para
completar sus ideas.
Ejercicio 1. Lee el siguiente texto y encuentra los 4 campos semánticos indicando las palabras clave que
determinaron tu selección:
1) test tube babies;

2) honorarios;
3) selección de candidatas;
4) ética de selección genética.
The Brave New Word of Reproductive Technology.

By Bonnie Erbe.
I. The first step is to drain some checking accounts of major assets in the vain pursuit of producing geneti-
cally- superior test-tube babies from donated eggs. A mere 14 years ago, the technology was perfected to
the point where a successful pregnancy was achieved and carried to term with a donor egg in Austra1ia.
Since then, more than 5,000 babies born of donor eggs have been delivered in the United States.
II. In that time, the ”honorarium” for a female donating that exemplary little ovum has jumped from an
insulting $250 to the now-customary sum of $2.500 on average. to the queenly sum of $35.000 recently
offered by a New Jersey couple. The couple ―seeking not just any egg, but an egg from the ovaries of a
Princeton student ―advertised through a broker who placed an ad in the Princeton University newspaper.
The ad said the couple wants to find an attractive, intelligent woman with proven fertility. Many applied.
Many were rejected, only one would be chosen.
III. The scenario of young women selling their ovarian properties poses a number of troubling questions. ls
the egg of a Harvard student worth more or less than the egg of a Princeton student? What will advertised
prices do to college coeds’ morale? Will egg purchasers put more of a premium on looks of intelligence? ls
it fair to implant the egg of a beautiful woman into an ugly woman’s uterus, or is consigning a child of great
intellectual capabilities to parents who are intellectually inferior to the child, constitutional? The list could
go on. However, if these technological options and legal queries have not yet bque te En el oggled the mind,
there’s more. A New York state legislator has introduced a bill to make it legal for doctors to remove and
preserve the sperm from dead men as long as the men supply written consent (before death, or course.)
Requests for legislative action came from a barrage of grieving widows whose husbands died earlier than
anticipated and who wanted to preserve the option or bearing their dead spouses’ children post-mortem.
36
IV. This may seem like a trivial matter, but since there are stringent laws in force governing removal of human
organs. The Legislature must act to make it clear that doctors may perform such surgeries as long as the grie-
ving widow requests the procedure. Applications for post-mortem sperm grafting started in 1994, when the
widow of a 29-year-old Bronx man who, was killed by a police officer decided she wanted his sperm stored.
The urologist who performed the operation said he has since had 20 more requests.
V. This scenario, too, raises some troubling philosophical and legal questions. If we recently came to blows with
China over sale of dead men’s organs how can we in good faith justify removal of dead men’s sperm? What if
an authorized woman gets hold of the sperm of a deceased wealthy man and the child she bears of this grue-
some union makes a large claim against the death man’s estate?
VI. The last question is closer to reality than many may wish it to be. A New Jersey couple, the Bruzzancas,
recently fought a child support battle over a child conceived with donor eggs and sperm and carried to term by
a surrogate mother the Bruzzancas hired. The couple divorced just before the child was born and the father
tried to avoid legal responsibility for the child.
VII. Attempts to legislate the bizarre web of human relationships that are bound to spring up from advances
in technology will never work. Laws will unfairly restrict some reasonable human desires and leave unfettered
some of our worst tendencies. The best way to deal with the crazy procreative wishes that may now become
reality is with a sense of humor and a strong stomach.
Ejercicio 2. Responde las siguientes preguntas según la información presentada en el texto.
1. ¿Desde hace cuánto tiempo se pudo llevar a cabo un embarazo exitoso a través de la donación de óvulos?
_________________________________________________________________________________________
2. ¿Cuál fue el precio más bajo y el más alto ofrecido para la compra de un óvulo?
_________________________________________________________________________________________
3. ¿Quién fue la persona elegida para donar el óvulo, según éste artículo?
_________________________________________________________________________________________
4. ¿Cuáles son las cuestiones filosóficas y legales que se desprenden de la venta de óvulos?
_________________________________________________________________________________________
5. ¿Cuáles han sido algunas de las peticiones que hacen las mujeres acerca de los espermatozoides de sus
esposos?
_________________________________________________________________________________________
37
TEMA 9: INFERENCIA DE VOCABULARIO
Objetivo: Al término de este tema serás capaz de identificar aquellas palabras que desconozcas a través de
la inferencia de significado utilizando el contexto del texto.
Al familiarizarnos con un texto, primero nos orientamos en elementos tipográficos e iconográficos presen-
tes en el mismo, buscamos información sobre la procedencia del artículo, quién lo escribe, cuándo, dónde;
nos apoyamos en las palabras clave para ubicarnos en el contenido del texto. Por supuesto, prestamos
atención al tiempo en que sucede la acción, nos apoyamos en los formantes de palabras y en los sustitutos
para no perder la secuencia de los acontecimientos.
Todos estos elementos nos ayudan a comprender un texto, pero también sirven a otro propósito; nos per-
miten hacer deducciones acerca de las palabras que desconocemos; a este proceso se le llama inferencia
de vocabulario. Inferir no es lo mismo que predecir. Predecimos cuando no tenemos mucha información
en relación con algo y hacemos suposiciones sobre esta información. De alguna manera tratamos de com-
prender de qué se trata. Cuando inferimos no adivinamos, nos basamos en la información contenida en
el texto para construir la parte que nos falta. Es como armar un rompecabezas; utilizamos las partes que
hemos trabajado para guiarnos en las formas, los colores, etc. a fin de facilitarnos la tarea de colocar las
demás piezas.
Los primeros elementos conocidos en un texto son aquellas palabras que, por su similitud con nuestro
idioma, son fácilmente reconocibles. A estas palabras se les conoce como cognados, palabras amigas o
palabras transparentes. Debemos basarnos en ellas para empezar a construir nuestras inferencias.
The protection of the environment is a now a worldwide concern, and every

country in the world has its own regulations and laws to protect it. Most would
think that this is a by-product of the mounting concern to save the earth’s
diminishing ecosystems, so it is surprising to find that some of these laws have
existed for centuries.
No encontramos muchos cognados, pero nos sirven para comenzar a inferir el vocabulario que no conoce-
mos. Las palabras protección, regulaciones, ecosistemas que se reducen, proteger y existir, nos permiten
inferir que se trata de un texto de ecología.
Si nos orientamos en la distribución oracional, encontramos primero la palabra de acción be. Como sabemos
que esta palabra describe o señala estados, lo más probable es que este párrafo contenga una definición.
También sabemos que el sufijo -ment indica la presencia de un nominador. Supongamos que conocemos
las palabras que le siguen. Entendemos entonces que la protección de “algo” es una preocupación mundial.
¿Qué es lo que se puede proteger a nivel mundial que tenga que ver con ecosistemas? Tiene que ser un
nominador y tiene que ser de importancia para todo el mundo; ¿qué posibles opciones existen?:
• planeta
• medio ambiente
• sociedad
• cultura
38
Las palabras sociedad y cultura, no están muy asociadas con la palabra ecosistema, las palabras medio ambiente
y planeta si podrían utilizarse. Sin embargo, la única que permite una regulación es el medio ambiente; por
tanto inferimos que environment significa medio ambiente.
La distribución del enunciado también nos permite encontrar el significado de las palabras que desconocemos.
Ejercicio 1: Subraya los cognados que encuentres en el texto.
The new criminal code in Spain has raised the maximum sentence for crimes
against the environment from six months to four years. Inspectors regularly make
unannounced visits to factories, and owners are warned of any actions they are taking
which are breaking the law. This usually does the trick. “Most of the companies, when
charged with an environmental offense or given a warning, change their systems of
production or install a purifying system.
The new criminal code, es fácil de inferir, porque conocemos la palabra “críminal”, significa criminal en español;
y “code”, que significa código, el orden de las palabras se muestra a continuación:
CUANTIFICADOR The
new
DESCRIPTOR
criminal
NOMINADOR code.
Por tanto, new es una característica para code, al igual que criminal, si se desconoce su significado en español,
entonces, ¿qué características puede tener un código criminal?
• actual
• apropiado
• restringido
Sin embargo, en el párrafo anterior se nos habló de la existencia de estas leyes las cuales han existido
desde la antiguedad; por tanto, el posible significado es actual o nuevo.
Has raised, indica una acción que comenzó en algun momento en el pasado, pero que afecta al presente.
Raised puede ser, de acuerdo con lo que continúa, dictado, estudiado, considerado, declarado, porque afecta
a la palabra sentencia, como también habla de un aumento de 6 meses a 4 años, lo más probable es que sea
aumentado, entonces, se aumento una sentencia para los crímenes contra el medio ambiente.
Factories, podríamos creer que es factores, pero los factores no se visitan, y menos por problemas ecológicos,
por tanto el equivalente más apropiado según la inferencia del contendio del texto es: fábricas. La palabra law
es un nominador porque esta acompañada de un cuantificador, este nominador se puede “infringir”. ¿Cuál
crees que sea el significado de law? Respuesta: __________________________.
39
Ejercicio 1: Lee el siguiente texto y responde los ejercicios que le siguen.
CRIMES AGAINST NATURE

By Suzanne Wales
I. The protection of the environment is a now a world-wide concern, and every country in the world has
its own regulations and laws to protect it. Most would think that this is a by-product of the mounting concern
to save the earth’s diminishing ecosystems, so it is surprising to find that some of these laws have existed for
centuries.
II. In Spain a twelfth century law prohibited the burning of forests, punishable by fifty lashes and an order
to replant the vegetation that had been burnt. In England the 1865 Rylands Versus Fletcher case brought about
a decision in the House of Lords that prohibited a person bringing something foreign onto private land which
is potentially damaging. This could now be applied to anything from toxic waste to water let loose through a
dam bust.
III. “These laws, especially on a civil level, have always existed,” says Luis Toldra, lawyer for the
environmental protection group DEPANA. “ One of the strongest is from 1898 that prohibits the killing of
insectivorous birds, because they protect crops from certain types of plagues. The collective sensibility that
now exists is new. We have less environment to protect, so therefore these old laws are being used more
and more.” But that does not mean to say that these laws are not being revised. The new criminal code in
Spain has raised the maximum sentence for crimes against the environment from six months to four years.
Inspectors regularly make unannounced visits to factories, and owners are warned of any actions they are
taking which are breaking the law. This usually does the trick. “Most of the companies, when charged with an
environmental offense or given a warning, change their systems of production or install a purifying system,”
he says. Companies are supplied with regular, ample information about the laws that govern their sector, so
pleading ignorance, as in other types of offenses, is not taken into account. The interaction of the local police
force is seen as imperative by lawyers such as Toldra if the case is ever going to land in court.
IV. If it does get there, it is up to the judge to decide whether the offender will serve a goal sentence or pay
a fine. The evidence has to be rock-solid, which is why environmental groups prefer it to be presented through
official bodies such as the police. “When you are talking about criminal charges, the evidence has to be crystal
clear and concise,” he believes, referring to the difficulty of identifying the person or persons responsible.
“Depending on who is judging the case, and there are now many judges who are specialized in the field, there
are chances that all-important precedents can be set”. That said, most environmental groups believe that
imposing strict preventive measures and setting fines work better in the long run than goal sentences, even in
‘symbolic’ cases.
V. Environmental law is not unified across Europe, despite the obvious advantages of it being so to avoid
any possible distortions in the functioning of the internal market. The 1993 Lugano Convention authorizes
member states to adopt stricter environmental measures and gives environmental groups the power to press
legal charges. However, it was only signed by five countries, showing that a harmonized liability system is still
a long way off. “Spain and Germany have the strictest laws,” says Toldra, “But what is surprising is that there
are huge differences between countries like Spain and France. This could be due to two factors: one is that the
governments don’t really care and the other is that the prosecution procedures are already efficient.”
VI. Clearly, industrial attitudes are changing, mainly due to lobbying groups, social pressure and more
severe punishments. It makes economic sense for a company to adhere to the law in environmental matters,
40
and even more sense for official bodies to enforce it. As Toldra summed up “If these administrative powers
had been more effective in the past, we wouldn’t have so much crime against the environment today; the only
thing it shows is an historical failure to protect it.”
Ejercicio 2: Escribe el número de párrafo que corresponda según la información proporcionada.
Párrafo
1. The way to impose criminal charges dependes on the evidence
brought against a person.
2. Environmental protection has been a concern of man for a long
time.
3. Thanks to lobbying groups people care more about environment.
4. Although regulations on environment have always existed, now

they are collective and are becoming harder.
5. Although environment is a concern for the European continent,
nations have not standardized laws.
Ejercicio 3: Decide si la siguiente información se corresponde SI o NO con el texto.
1. In the twelfth century Spain people only had to repair the

damages they originated.
2. The killing of insectivorous birds was prohibited because they
were a rare species.
3. Factories damaging environment are immediately punished.
4. Is the judge who decides if the offender is fined or sent to jail.
5. Environmental laws are not unified in Europe nowadays.
Ejercicio 4: Responde las siguientes preguntas con la información presentada en el texto.

1. ¿Por qué las leyes ambientales se usan más ahora? (párrafo III)
______________________________________________________________________________
2. ¿Qué es lo que generalmente les funciona a los inspectores ambientales en España (III)?
______________________________________________________________________________
3. ¿Por qué sería conveniente que las leyes ambientales estuvieran unificadas en Europa? (párrafo IV)
______________________________________________________________________________
4. ¿Qué documento mencionado en el párrafo IV fue firmado por 5 naciones solamente?

______________________________________________________________________________
5. ¿Qué es lo que los cuerpos oficiales están apoyando? (párrafo V)

_______________________________________________________________________________
41
TEMA 10: COHESIÓN
Objetivo: Al término de este tema serás capaz de identificar los elementos que permiten tener una estruc-
tura organizada para comprender su contenido.
A lo largo de este curso de lectura has aprendido un texto escrito esta conformado por una serie de pala-
bras que toman el lugar de otras para evitar que éste suene repetitivo. Estas palabras entran dentro de
la cohesión textual, esto es, aquellos elementos que permiten que el texto tenga una estructura que nos
permita comprenderlo.
Dentro de los elementos cohesivos encontramos:
• La referencia - referentes como he, she, it, his, her, him, their, this, that, etc.
• La sustitución, cuando un nominador sustituye a otro.
• La elipsis - cuando una palabra no se repite porque se sobreentiende de que se habla.
• Los conectores intraoracionales - aquellos que enlazan ideas dentro del enunciado.
MODELOS DE ESTRATEGIAS DE LECTURA ELABORADOS POR LIC. RAQUEL GPE. GARCIA J. V,
COHESIÓN
se compone de
REFERENCIA SUSTITUCIÓN ELIPSIS CONECTORES
constituida por constituida por consiste en

son
PALABRAS QUE NOMINADORES PÉRDIDA DE INTRA-

TOMAN EL QUE TOMAN EL PALABRAS PARA ORACIONA-L
LUGAR DE LUGAR DE EVITAR ES: and, but,
NOMINADORES: OTROS REPETICIONES or, nor, etc.
él, esto, etc. NOMINADORES: INNECESARIAS
la institución, la EN UN
persona, etc. ENUNCIADO:
~one
~auxiliares (did, etc.)
~inexistencia
42
Fíjate en el siguiente ejemplo:
A library may be very large, but if it is in disorder, it is not as useful as one that is small but tidy.
library = it, one.
but = contrasta la información
referente it
sustituto -
elipsis one
conector but
The oak tree has long been a symbol of strength and bravery. Mindful of this symbolism, the
Romans, who were hardy people, decorated their war heroes with crowns of oak leaves.
this symbolism = strength and bravery.

Romans = who, hardy people, their.
referente this, who, their

sustituto strength and bravery, hardy people
elipsis -
conector -
También podemos encontrar el “it” usado como un impersonal, esto es no se refiere a algo específico.
Paintings have been found inside caves inhabited by cavemen. It is believed that these pictures
were not drawn primarily for decoration.
Cuando encontramos este caso se utiliza la forma “se” en español: Se cree, que estas pinturas no se dibujaron
sólo como decoración. Como podrás observar, un escritor, elige los elementos que mejor sirven a su propósito,
y es labor del lector conocer las formas de sustitución para poder entender lo que se lee.
Ejercicio 1: Lee el texto Meteorite reveals 4 billion year old secret from Mars.
UK News
Electronic Telegraph
Thursday August 8 1996
Issue 445
Scientists stir the primeval chemical soup

By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
Meteorite reveals 4 billion-year-old secret from Mars
I. CHEMISTS and computer scientists have made impressive progress in the effort to find out what
happened on Earth more than three billion years ago, when stirrings in a primeval pool crossed the divide
between a chemical reaction and the kind that occurs in living things.
43
II. In the light of recent work, it seems that life on Earth may have begun not with a bang but a chemical
whimper, making it a not particularly improbable event that could occur elsewhere in the cosmos - such as on
Mars. Chemists are testing whether the primeval chemical soup was rich enough for life to emerge.
III. Today, in the journal Nature, Dr Reza Ghadiri, of the Scripps Research Institute, California, and colleagues
show that little protein chunks, called peptides, thought to be present on the primitive Earth, were capable of
making copies of themselves - a fundamental property of living things.
IV. Work by Prof Julius Rebek’s group, lso now based at the Scripps, has created synthetic chemical
reactions with certain features of living things. ust as biological life ultimately emerges from the complex
interactions of inanimate microscopic units called molecules, so some believe that artificial life may emerge
from complex logical interactions within a computer.
V. One of the most striking artificial life simulations was carried out by Thomas Ray, now in Kyoto, who
evolved within a computer a community of “organisms”, strips of computer code competing for memory space.
VI. Another such experiment, described earlier this year in the journal Physica D by Andrew Pargellis at
Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, showed how replicating programs - in effect artificial life forms - spontaneously
evolve within a primordial soup of computer code.
VII. But if the evolution of life can be partially understood, not even scientists can quite agree on what
we mean by “life”. The scientific quest for the origins of life began in earnest with the idea that it could be
understood in terms of plausible chemical and physical processes on primitive Earth. This was born in an
epoch-making treatise published in 1924 by Alexander Ivanovich Oparin.
VIII. In 1953, Stanley Miller, then a student at the University of Chicago, created a primeval world using two
connected flasks: one containing an “ocean” of water, the other a stew of simple substances thought at that
time to be similar to the primeval atmosphere.
IX. When Miller passed a bolt of simulated lightning through the atmosphere, he found that after a few
days the water contained certain amino acids, the basic building blocks of proteins essential to life on earth.
Since then, a large body of evidence has been accumulated showing that a range of biologically important
molecules can be made in a similar way. Others can be created with the help of light. Astronomers have shown
that any missing ones could have arrived on meteorites.
X. But if the evolution of life can be partially understood, not even scientists can quite agree on what
we mean by “life”. Biologists can list all sorts of features possessed by living things. As well as the ability to
reproduce, these include the existence of genetic information, complexity, organization and so on.
XI. But exceptions can always be found. For example, viruses cannot reproduce without a host organism.
The most intriguing idea is the proposal that life is intricately associated with evolution, a property that belongs
not to a single individual or gene but to a whole system.
XII. One of the most general working definitions is that adopted by the Exobiology Program within N.A.S.A:
life is a self-sustained chemical system capable of undergoing Darwinian evolution.
Front | UK | International | City | Sport | Crossword | Weather | Matt | Connected | etcetera | A-Z | Search | Marketplace | Classified | Help |
Electronic Telegraph is a Registered Service Mark of Telegraph Group Limited
44
Ejercicio 2: Identifica los elementos de cohesión con la palabra que sustituyen o en el caso de los conectores
e interpreta la función que éstos desempeñan.
REFERENTE SUSTITUTO ELÍPSIS CONECTOR
Ejercicio 3: Después de leer el texto, responde las siguientes preguntas.
1. ¿Cómo se piensa que comenzó la vida en la tierra, y por qué se piensa que fue así? Da razones para respaldar
su respuesta.
_________________________________________________________________________________________
2. ¿A que actividad se le considera una propiedad de los seres vivos?

_________________________________________________________________________________________
3. Explique la comparación que se hace en el texto entre el inicio de la vida artificial y la vida biológica.
_________________________________________________________________________________________
4. Qué posible definición de “vida” se presenta en el texto?

_________________________________________________________________________________________
5. ¿Qué teoría de la vida toma en cuenta las características de los virus?

_________________________________________________________________________________________
6. ¿Cuántos experimentos menciona el texto?

_________________________________________________________________________________________
7. ¿Cuál fue el descubrimiento del Dr. Reza Ghadiri y su equipo de trabajo?

_________________________________________________________________________________________
8. ¿Qué componente fue creado por el Prof. Julius Rebek y su grupo?

_________________________________________________________________________________________
9. ¿Qué nos dice Andrew Pargellist sobre la vida artificial?

_________________________________________________________________________________________
10. ¿Cuál fue la aportación de Stanley Miller?

_________________________________________________________________________________________
45
TEMA 11: TOMA DE NOTAS
Objetivo: Al término de este tema serás capaz de tomar notas de una exposición de un profesor, conferencista,
de libros y/o apuntes de su área de estudio, para organizar y optimizar la información obtenida.
Al finalizar esta lección serás capaz de escribir tus apuntes en clase, recopilar información de libros y otros
materiales escritos y para tomar notas en conferencias.
La toma de notas es una forma organizada de registrar información y sintetizarla para facilitarte el estudio de
lo que tienes que aprender o para repasar y preparar exámenes.
El registro de la información te permite recopilarla para no olvidarla.
La revisión te facilita el recuerdo de la información, porque permite la reorganización de la información en un
orden lógico.
La síntesis actúa como una guía de estudio para facilitarte la tarea de prepararte para tus exámenes.
La toma de notas se conforma por las siguientes operaciones fundamentales:
»» El registro de la información.
»» La revisión y aclaraciones.
»» La síntesis.
»» El estudio de las notas.
El registro de la información nos permite recopilar la información para no olvidarla.

La revisión facilita el recuerdo porque permite la reorganización de la información en un orden lógico.
La síntesis actúa como una guía de estudio.
El estudio de las notas se emplea como preparación para los exámenes.
Una adecuada toma de notas ofrece una serie de ventajas, nos permite tener: notas mejor organizadas, la
rápida identificación de las palabras y conceptos clave de una información, guías de estudio eficientes para
preparación de exámenes.
Para tomar notas de manera eficiente te recomendamos: que uses un cuaderno de espiral tamaño profesional
o una carpeta de argollas y hojas. También debes tener a la mano y en una caja o envase fácil de transportar
los siguientes materiales:
»» Plumas y/o lápices.

»» Lápices o plumas de colores.
»» Marcadores de texto.
»» Regla.
»» Líquido corrector.
Además debes disponer de:
»» Materiales proporcionados por tu profesor o libro.

»» Instrucciones sobre las tareas a cumplir.
Debes identificar las palabras clave y las ideas principales. Las palabras clave se relacionan con el material que
se esta estudiando; por ejemplo, en una clase de historia podrían ser los nombres de los protagonistas prin-
46
cipales de la Independencia, en una clase de pedagogía las corrientes de aprendizaje más importantes. Para
identificar las ideas principales guíate por los títulos y subtítulos de los materiales de estudio, el contenido de
los índices o esquemas de los libros o artículos a estudiar.
Formato sugerido para la toma de notas:
»» Utiliza una hoja de cuaderno de preferencia, y escribe sólo de un lado de la

hoja.
»» Divide el papel de manera vertical con una línea a unos cinco centímetros de dis-
tancia del margen izquierdo de la hoja.
»» Escribe en la parte superior de la hoja el nombre del curso, la fecha y el número
de hoja (es importante numerar las hojas de las notas).
»» Escribe las ideas principales y detalles de apoyo en el lado derecho de la página,
en la columna de notas.
»» Escribe del lado izquierdo los conceptos y palabras clave.
»» Salta una línea entre ideas diferentes y dos entre temas diferentes.
»» No escribas oraciones completas, usa símbolos y abreviaturas (muchos símbolos
matemáticos son útiles y ahorran espacio).
»» Registra ideas y conceptos en oraciones cortas.
»» Registra definiciones y explicaciones en frases cortas.
»» Escribe un resumen del material al final de las notas que sólo incluya las ideas
principales.
Este método te será útil para tomar notas durante una clase:
»» Utiliza una hoja de cuaderno de preferencia, y escribe sólo de un lado de la

hoja.
»» Divide el papel de manera vertical con una línea a unos cinco centímetros de dis-
tancia del margen izquierdo de la hoja.
»» Escribe en la parte superior de la hoja el nombre del curso, la fecha y el número
de hoja.
»» Escribe del lado izquierdo los tópicos en que el conferencista dividió su interven-
ción (generalmente en los resúmenes de la conferencia o al inicio de la exposición se
presenta esta información).
»» Escribe del lado derecho los conceptos y el desarrollo que el conferencista expon-
ga. Recuerda resumir las ideas.
»» Salta una línea entre temas diferentes.
»» No escribas oraciones completas, usa símbolos y abreviaturas (muchos símbolos
matemáticos son útiles y ahorran espacio).
»» Registra ideas y conceptos en oraciones cortas.
»» Registra definiciones y explicaciones en frases cortas.
Después de la clase revisa tus notas y escribe un resumen del material al final de tus notas, que incluya solo los
conceptos fundamentales de la exposición.
Lo siguiente es una explicación del funcionamiento del sistema verbal del inglés que estudiaste en el nivel 1.
Utilizaremos esta información para ejemplificar la toma de notas:
47
FORMAS EN PASADO
PASADO SIMPLE PASADO PERFECTO PRESENTE PERFECTO
Auxiliar DID (se usa para preguntar Auxiliar HAD Auxiliar HAVE /HAS
o negar)
Señala dos acciones que ya sucedieron: (también es un tiempo
La acción ya sucedió, el suceso es had + el pasado participio del verbo pasado)
irrepetible. principal marcan la acción que sucedió
La Gran Pirámide de Egipto se primero y le sigue un verbo en pasado La acción ya tuvo lugar, no se
construyó en 2,600 A.C. participio, la segunda parte de la oración precisa el momento exacto.
es un enunciado en pasado simple. Este tiempo se usa cuando es
The bank had closed when the man posible que la acción se vuelva
arrived. a repetir.
I have been to Veracruz many
times.
La forma afirmativa del pasado La forma negativa se forma agregando la have + verbo en pasado
no utiliza auxiliar, sólo el verbo en partícula “not” al auxiliar: hadn’t. participio se utilizan para las
pasado (Los verbos regulares solo personas I, you, we, you, they.
agregan la terminación “ed”), los Para he, she, it, se utiliza el
irregulares consúltalos en la lista auxilar has. El negativo se
que se encuentra en los anexos de forma utilizando la partícula
tu manual). not junto con el auxiliar:
haven’t, hasn’t.
El pasado participio señala las terminaciones –ado –ido y –to –so –cho en
español (dicho, hecho)
El presente se representa de la siguiente manera:
PRESENTE PRESENTE SIMPLE PRESENTE FUTURO
CONTINUO
Utiliza los auxiliares Utiliza el verbo “be” como auxiliar
do / does más el verbo acompañado de la
terminación ”ing”
El auxiliar do / does sólo se usa Hábitos. Este tiempo marca el momento No existe en inglés como tal, se
para preguntar o negar. Información factual (que es verda- en que se realiza una acción, por forma con el modal “will” o con
he/she/it agregan “s” al verbo en dera y comprobable). ejemplo: estoy leyendo. formas idiomáticas.
modo afirmativo.
Para formar el negativo se agrega 1) She works in an office. 1) She is typing a letter. 1) I am going to study English.
la partícula not al auxiliar: 2) I am studying English next
don’t /doesn’t. 2) I study at Acatlán. 2) I am taking my English class semester.
now.
48
BE como verbo – sirve para representar descripciones y estados:
Descripciones Estados PASADO PRESENTE FUTURO

(físicos, mentales
anímicos)
I am Mexican. I am: tall, thin, old was were am is are going to /

will + “be”.
He is a student. happy, sad he you
I she we
I, he, she, it you, we, it they
they
She is married. hungry, angry
Una adecuada toma de notas ofrece una serie de ventajas, te permite tener:
»» Apuntes mejor organizados.

»» La rápida identificación de las palabras y conceptos clave de una información.
»» Guías de estudio eficientes para preparación de exámenes.
Utilizando información sobre tiempos verbales en inglés, se escribió el siguiente ejemplo de toma de notas:
Comprensión de lectura, tiempos verbales 17/10-2007

Auxiliares Tiempo presente: do /does
Auxiliares Tiempo pasado: did, have, had.
To be am, is, are (presente)
was, were, been (pasado)
RESÚMEN
Los tiempos verbales en inglés se forman con auxiliares que indican los
tiempos verbales presente y pasado.
Como verás, tomar notas es un procedimiento sencillo y práctico para organizar el material de estudio y pre-
parar exámenes.
WHY IS COMMUNICATION IMPORTANT
http://www.caresearch.com.au/caresearch/ForPatientsandFamilies/LivingWithIll-
ness/WhyIsCommunicationImportant/tabid/1095/Default.aspx
This page was created on 26 May 2009 and is due for review in May 2011
49
Good communication is important. It can help someone to understand what another
person is saying. It also means that they can express their own needs and concerns.
When someone is seriously ill, there will be many things that need to be discussed.
Some of these discussions may be difficult and emotional.
It is important that people find and use information to help plan future needs. This
will help when communicating with family members, friends, health professionals
and colleagues.
Communication is important and can be positive if handled well. It can also be hur-
tful, depending on how it is done and the words that are used. Communication needs
to be open and sensitive, as well as appropiate to the situation. The amount of infor-
mation required by an individual can change with the circunstances.
Family Communication
Some families talk openly with each other but this is not true of all families. This is
not easily changed.
The way in which families are made up nowadays can make communication more
difficult. People do not always live close to each other geographically. Divorce and
remarriage create new families that may have different communication needs and
patterns.
If relationships have been difficult in the past, or if new relationships are fragile, pro-
blems may get worse at such an emotional time. Family members can have different
views. There may be long standing differences. All of this can cause conflict, perhaps
as it always has done.
Occasionally people will make moves to reconnect with family members, former
partners or friends at this time. This can bring its own difficulties but also often great
rewards and peace of mind.
Communication can be difficult but not impossible. Decide ways in which family
members can best talk with each other. Important information will need to be sha-
red with everyone.
Ejercicio 1. Escribe tus notas en relación con la importancia de la comunicación. De preferencia realízalo en
tu cuaderno.
50
TEMA 12: GENERALIZACIÓN
Objetivo: Al término de este tema serás capaz de abstraer lo esencial de las ideas principales para sintetizar-
las y utilizar la información extrapolandola a otras situaciones.
La generalización nos sirve para unir ideas que corresponden a un mismo concepto por medio de una frase que
las contenga a todas. Para poder lograrlo se debe sintetizar la información buscando términos generalizado-
res, que nos permitan expresar muchas ideas en pocas palabras.
La generalización nos es útil para ayudarnos a redactar la idea central de un texto, dar subtítulos a bloques de
información y otras tareas que impliquen sintetizar información bajo un mismo rubro.
Para llevar a cabo la generalización es necesario encontrar las ideas principales de un texto; si queremos co-
locar subtítulos a un texto, se busca un posible título a cada bloque. Si se pretende obtener la idea central
entonces se unen los conceptos de las ideas principales para redactar un enunciado que sintetice el contenido
completo del texto. Consulta el mapa conceptual de la siguiente hoja para darte una mejor idea del funciona-
miento de la generalización.
El siguiente ejemplo nos permite ver como se generaliza la información en un bloque.
Lee el siguiente texto atentamente.
Most of our public school kids are already tested to death. Many teachers around
the country complain, and rightly so, that they spend weeks upon weeks “teaching
to the test.” This means that they are not working on a general curriculum, but pre-
pping the kids for a specific test. I do not see adding one more national test as bene-
fical in any way.
I think it is very important that schools go back to teaching math “without” calcula-
tors (at least in elementary grades). We also need to get away from feel good group-
think and get back to helping kids achieve on their own. Nothing will improve self-
esteem like a legitimate sense of accomplishment.
De los posibles títulos que se nos presentan a continuación, el mejor sería: Testing Doesn’t Equal Teaching,
porque no habla sobre la autoevaluación, ni cuestiona la necesidad de aplicar exámenes. El foco está dado en
la exagerada cantidad de exámenes a los que son expuestos los alumnos de las escuelas norteamericanas.
»» TEST YOURSELF
»» TESTING DOESN’T EQUAL TEACHING
»» NO MORE TESTING
52
GENERALIZACIÓN
a nivel
SECCIÓN TEXTO COMPLETO
requiere de
LECTURA DE ESTUDIO
para localizar
SÍNTESIS QUE
ORACIÓN TÓPICO CONTENGA
DETALLES DE APOYO INFORMACIÓN
BLOQUES TEMÁTICOS RELEVANTE
Lee el siguiente texto.
Ejercicio 1. Coloca el subtítulo generalizador a cada bloque.
LOG ON TO LEARN
By Don Oldenburg
Washington Post Staff Writer
January 30, 1998; Page N34
When Joanna Hoffman had to write a report on melanoma last November for her
health class, the Paint Branch High School sophomore researched it entirely at home
– and entirely online. Searching the Internet’s vast resources, she found useful infor-
mation on 20 World Wide Web sites, ranging from university studies on skin cancer
to the American Cancer Society’s site. “For this particular report, I only used the In-
ternet,” says Joanna, 15, adding that without it she probably would have depended
on encyclopedias at the school library. “I found it more convenient to simply print
out pages of information rather than to hand-write notes from a book.” Connected
to the Net since her older sister taught her the basics three years ago, Joanna keeps
up with online news about her favorite music groups and surfs for other interests.
And as the homework assignments have become more demanding, she has been
going online more than ever to do them.
52
“I think it’s a great way to get kids to do their schoolwork – and she likes it,” says Bar-
bara Hoffman, Joanna’s mother, who sometimes has to restrict her daughter’s online
time because it ties up the phone line at their Silver Spring home. Hoffman also likes
that her daughter has been more enthusiastic about homework on the Internet than
she has about trudging to the public library.
“There is always an answer somewhere on the Net,” says Joanna, who earned an “A”
on the melanoma report. “In this day and age, the phrase ‘I don’t know’ is hardly
ever applicable.”
Need to write bios of ancient Greek statesmen? Want help on algebra equations?
Looking for the latest data on Mars? Students from elementary school through high
school are increasingly diving into the Web’s 150 million-plus pages to find answers
and resources – many previously beyond their grasp.
A big chunk of today’s online population (from 15 to 22 million in the United States,
according to current estimates) already is “kids from 7 or 8 years old to high school,”
says Robert Kraut, professor of social psychology and human-computer interaction
at Carnegie Mellon University.
Most students first encounter the Internet as little more than an awesome electronic
research library. With a decent search engine, some know-how and a little patience,
they can find answers online to nearly any factual question. The Net speaks volumes
(some sites, literally) of searchable encyclopedias, dictionaries, thesauruses, atlases
and almanacs.
“The Internet is an ideal learning tool because it allows children to seek knowledge
at their own pace and interest level,” says Kari Sable Burns, a former kindergarten
teacher who now runs an information technology consulting firm, Kari & Associa-
tes, in Olympia, Wash. She noted how the Internet multiplies ways for youngsters to
learn: “If I were studying birds, I could go to a site sponsored by a museum in New
Zealand and listen to the distinct bird calls while looking at their description and
reading about their habitat.”
It’s also true that the Internet can multiply ways for youngsters to cheat. Teachers
worry about how easily entire pages of information can be copied into reports wi-
thout properly citing them – either intentionally or through simple forgetfulness.
Term-paper factories are now hawking other people’s reports and original term pa-
pers on the Internet. Some children even post their own reports online, only to have
them ripped off by students elsewhere.
“What I’m hearing from teachers is, ‘How are we going to stay one step ahead of
the kids?’ “ Says Charlotte Thompson, the library media specialist at Frederick High
53
School. “So teachers are changing their strategies.” At Frederick High and elsewhere,
some teachers are structuring research paper assignments with many checked and
graded steps. “We don’t just do a paper, we do a process,” says Thompson. “That
makes it nearly impossible to use a canned paper.” But most are assigning work that
emphasizes “higher-level learning” –synthesizing, analyzing and evaluating, says
Thompson. A paper making a case for Hamlet as a hero or villain, for example, is har-
der to plagiarize than a basic summary of Hamlet. “It’s going to be a real challenge
for us, but all for the good,” says Thompson.
At home, too, some online-savvy students have also found that when parents of-
ten stumble over long-forgotten lessons, the Internet provides credible help with
basic homework. At “schoolwork.org” (also known as “schoolwork.ugh”), students
find links to dozens of on-line resources in 22 categories, from Art to Statistics. (For
addresses for this and other educational sites, see the sidebar.)
“I think young people like the site because it acknowledges that having to do ho-
mework mostly sucks,” says Maureen Shields, head of Adult Services at the New
City Library, in New City, N.Y., who created schoolwork.org in the fall of 1996 to help
students find good information online.
Shields believes the Internet is already a vital and necessary part of learning. “As a
librarian, I know that print and CD-ROM resources can’t keep up with the complexity
and depth of subjects taught in a lot of courses,” she says. “They certainly can’t keep
up with the expectations that students, parents and educators have – which is fast,
detailed information that exactly targets the question asked.”
That may explain why “homework helper” sites are increasing online. Some, like
America Online’s “AOL Homework,” emphasize forums, message boards or “Ask a
Teacher” features in which students e-mail or post questions and get rapid responses.
Some get more subject-specific: When desperate students interrupted the humani-
ties. lit.authors.shakespearenewsgroup’s ongoing discussions of the Bard’s oeuvre
during finals last December, its regulars gently redirected them to “The Shakespeare
Homework Helper.”
But some homework helper sites are to academia what Hamburger Helper is to the
culinary arts. “About 65 to 70 percent of the posts on this board are either degra-
ding to school, selling something or irrelevant,” says Tyler Riggs, 13, who joined the
alt.school.homework-help newsgroup a year ago and recently volunteered to be its
“Answer Man.”
An honor role eighth-grader at Mount Logan Middle School, in Logan, Utah, Riggs
says that the newsgroups’ members are mostly middle- and high-school students
who primarily ask for help with languages and math problems. “There have been
54
times when I have done one-on-one help, and I had to get out a book and do it step-
by-step with them,” says Riggs, who tackles his own homework before anyone else’s.
“Other times, I have referenced the person to a teacher or professor who was an
expert in that particular topic.”
Interviewing an expert source for school projects was once almost unthinkable. But
now government, university and institutional Web sites often provide e-mail links
to staff members and faculties, and compendium sites such as Pitsco’s “Ask the Ex-
perts” provide direct links to experts in various fields who have volunteered to field
questions from students.
Meanwhile, online field trips and collaborative projects provide ongoing “first-hand
experiences” for children built around a journey or topic of investigation. On the
Public Broadcasting System Web site, kids climb Mount Everest and explore the pyra-
mids. At the Discovery Channel Online, children recently learned about “the brief
history of skateboards” and chatted with NASA experts about renewed interest in
returning to the moon. Says Burns, of Kari & Associates: “Instead of a TV program
being the entire lesson, it’s the introduction to the lesson.”
Seymour Papert, a professor of learning research at MIT’s Media Lab who has stu-
died children and computers for more than two decades, says these kinds of oppor-
tunities on the Internet will change the nature of education. “They are getting the
sense that they can direct their own learning,” says Papert. “They can do it with this
highly empowering and exciting sense of pursuing knowledge themselves.”
© Copyright 1998 The Washington Post Company
Ejercicio 2. Argumenta en la siguiente tabla la elección de tus subtítulos, basándote en el texto.
JUSTIFICACIÓN DE LA ELECCIÓN DE LOS SUBTÍTULOS

1.
55
2.
3.
4.
5.
6.
56
TEMA 13: CLASIFICACIÓN
Objetivo: Al término de este tema serás capaz de discriminar información similar y agruparla en elementos de
la misma clase para conocer cuántas secciones de información contiene el texto y de que tipo son.
La clasificación de la información es un proceso sumamente útil que nos permite agrupar elementos de la
misma clase a la vez que nos permite separarlos de otras clases diferentes.
La clasificación se lleva a cabo observando primero los elementos a clasificar, estos elementos se agrupan por
características similares, según el objetivo que nos lleve a hacer dicha clasificación. Por ejemplo cuando clasifi-
camos frutas, podemos clasificarlas por su sabor, por su tamaño, por su color, por sus características, observa
el siguiente organizador de información:
Diferencias Similitudes Diferencias
Semillas externas Color Nace de arbusto

Nace de plantas Sabor
Tamaño
Fresa Frambuesa
Semilla
Consistencia de la Tamaño Tipo de cáscara
fruta Nace de árbol
Color
Ciruela Durazno
Los animales se unen en dos grandes grupos: los vertebrados y los invertebrados, pero estos a su vez se pue-
57
den agrupar en subgrupos, que a su vez se agrupan nuevamente según sus características.
La clave está en observar las características que nos interesa agrupar y hacer la clasificación correspondiente
de acuerdo con el objeto de la clasificación.
Ejercicio 1. Elige uno de los siguientes casos y clasifica la información que necesites para tu actividad hacien-
do uso de las TIC´s.
1. Eres un empresario que desea utilizar las herramientas tecnológicas para mejorar su negocio.
2. Eres un profesor que ha decidido utilizar las nuevas tecnologías para mejorar sus clases.
3. Eres un investigador que necesita utilizar las TIC para hacer su investigación más eficiente y mostrar sus
resultados de manera más sencilla.
WHAT IS ICT?
TUTOR2U - A Global Community of Teachers
http://tutor2u.net/business/ict/intro_what_is_ict.htm
Consultado: 16 -09-2010
You see the letters ICT everywhere - particularly in education. But what does it mean?
Read our brief introduction to this important and fast-changing subject.
________________________________________
ICT is an acronym that stands for Information Communications Technology. Howe-

ver, apart from explaining an acronym, there is not a universally accepted definition
of ICT? Why? Because the concepts, methods and applications involved in ICT are
constantly evolving on an almost daily basis. It is difficult to keep up with the changes
they happen so fast.
Let’s focus on the three words behind ICT:
»» INFORMATION
»» COMMUNICATIONS
»» TECHNOLOGY
A good way to think about ICT is to consider all the uses of digital technology that
already exist to help individuals, businesses and organizations use information.
ICT covers any product that will store, retrieve, manipulate, transmit or receive in-
formation electronically in a digital form. For example, personal computers, digital
television, email, robots.
So ICT is concerned with the storage, retrieval, manipulation, transmission or receipt

of digital data. Importantly, it is also concerned with the way these different uses can
work with each other.
In business, ICT is often categorized into two broad types of product:
(1) The traditional computer-based technologies (things you can typically do on a

personal computer or using computers at home or at work); and
58
(2) The more recent and fast-growing range of digital communication technologies
(which allow people and organizations to communicate and share information digi-
tally).
Let’s take a brief look at these two categories to demonstrate the kinds of products
and ideas that are covered by ICT:
Traditional Computer Based Technologies

These types of ICT include:
Application Brand Use

Word processing E.g. Microsoft Write letters, reports, etc.
Word.
E.g. Microsoft Analyze financial information; calcula-
Spreadsheets Excel. tions; create forecasting models, etc.
E.g. Oracle, Managing data in many forms, from

Database Microsoft SQL basic lists (e.g. customer contacts
software Server, through to complex material (e.g.
Access. catalogue).
Make presentations, either directly

Presentation E.g. Microsoft using a computer screen or data
software PowerPoint. projector. Publish in digital format via
email or over the Internet.
E.g. Adobe In-

Desktop design, Quark Produce newsletters, magazines and
publishing Express, other complex documents.
Microsoft
Publisher.
E.g Adobe Photos-
Graphics software hop and Illustra- Create and edit images such as logos,
tor; Macromedia drawings or pictures for use in DTP,
Freehand and web sites or other publications.
Fireworks.
Specialist Applications - Examples (there are many!)
59
Manage an organisation’s accounts
Accounting E.g. Sage, including revenues/sales, purchases,
package Oracle. bank accounts etc. A wide range of
systems is available ranging from basic
packages suitable for small businesses
through to sophisticated ones
aimed at multinational companies.
Computer Aided Computer Aided
Design Design (CAD) is the Specialized CAD programs exist for
use of computers many types of design: architectural,
to assist the design engineering, electronics, roadways.
process.
Software that By collecting and analyzing data on
Customer allows businesses them such as their product preferen-
Relations to better unders- ces, buying habits etc. Often linked
Management (CRM) tand their to software applications that run call
customers. centers and loyalty cards for example.
Digital communication technologies

The C part of ICT refers to the communication of data by electronic means, usually
over some distance. This is often achieved via networks of sending and receiving
equipment, wires and satellite links.
The technologies involved in communication tend to be complex; there are aspects
of digital communications that you need to be aware of. These relate primarily to
the types of network and the ways of connecting to the Internet. Let’s look at these
two.
Internal networks
Usually referred to as a local area network (LAN), this involves linking a number of
hardware items (input and output devices plus computer processing) together wi-
thin an office or building.
The aim of a LAN is to be able to share hardware facilities such as printers or scan-
ners, software applications and data. This type of network is invaluable in the office
environment where colleagues need to have access to common data or program-
mes.
External networks
Often you need to communicate with someone outside your internal network, in
this case you will need to be part of a Wide Area Network (WAN). The Internet is the
ultimate WAN - it is a vast network of networks.
ICT in a Broader Context

Also consider the following important topics that deal with the way ICT is used and
managed in an organization:
60
»»The nature of information (the “I” in ICT); this covers topics such as the me-
aning and value of information; how information is controlled; the limitations
of ICT; legal considerations.
»»Management of information - this covers how data is captured, verified and

stored for effective use; the manipulation, processing and distribution of infor-
mation; keeping information secure; designing networks to share information.
»»Information systems strategy - this considers how ICT can be used within a
business or organization as part of achieving goals and objectives.
Ejercicio 2. Completa el diagrama con la información que te apoya en tu actividad.
TRADITIONAL
COMPUTER
BASED
TECHNOLOGIES
ESCRIBE AQUÍ
DIGITAL
TU ACTIVIDAD
COMMUNICATION
TECHNOLOGIES
INTERNAL
NETWORKS
EXTERNAL
TECHNOLOGIES
61
TEMA 14: JERARQUIZACIÓN
Objetivo: Al término de este tema serás capaz de utilizar información ya clasificada de un texto para ordenar-
la y acomodarla y acomodarla por rango de tema e importancia.
Cuando se desea jerarquizar información primero se debe clasificar, como vimos en el tema anterior, cuando
se encuentra clasificada se jerarquiza. La jerarquización se logra colocando la información de lo general a lo
particular. El proceso es parecido a poner una caja pequeña dentro de otra más grande, hasta colocarlas to-
das por tamaños. La caja que contiene todas las demás es el concepto eje, -el más amplio- que contiene a los
demás conceptos.
Uno de los propósitos de la lectura es el empleo de la información obtenida para llevar a cabo otras tareas,
como serían la preparación de notas para exámenes, la síntesis de la información como ayuda a la memoria o
para utilizarla para otros fines.
ORDENAMIENTO
DE LA
INFORMACIÓN
por medio de
se incorporan
JERARQUIZACIÓN COMUNICACIÓN
ordena agrupa
INFORMACIÓN
INFORMACIÓN CONTENIDO
DE LO GENERAL ELEMENTOS QUE
A LO COMPARTEN
PARTICULAR RASGOS COMUNES
ESENCIALES
ejemplo
CONTAMINACIÓN ejemplo
del aire PLANTA:

del agua árbol, arbusto.
del suelo FLOR:
por ruido rosa, clavel, nardo.
ORDENAMIENTO DE LA
para INFORMACIÓN PARA SU para
UTILIZACIÓN EN NOTAS, SÍNTESIS,
ETC.
62
Lee el siguiente texto y observa el ejemplo de jerarquización:
FORMAL EDUCATION AND QUALITY

Education America Online -Denver, Colorado.
Traditional methods of Western education, the “transmission model,” have their

roots in the monastic schools of the 7th and 8th century A.D. and subsequently the
early European universities of the 13th and 14th centuries. Similarly, notions of “qua-
lity” education are also centuries, even millennia, old. It is important to note that
the context for determining quality has historically been limited by the purpose of
education and the population for whom formal education was provided.
The early monastic schools were established to promulgate religious doctrine and
the early European universities to promulgate religious doctrine and to institutionali-
ze the educated status of the noble class. Formal education, therefore, was an extre-
mely exclusive activity, reserved for a very small and elite portion of the population.
Moreover, early academic education was devoted almost exclusively to transmitting
content or “knowledge.” The curriculum was finite and was expected to serve the
learner for life. Therefore, the criteria for “quality” were quite limited and could be
assessed with two basic questions:
1) Was the instructor a content expert?

2) Could learners demonstrate, through some type of examination, a mastery of the
information provided to them by the teacher?
Para llevar a cabo una jerarquización de la información es necesario clasificarla primero, esto es separar la
información en sus partes.
CLASIFICACIÓN DE LA INFORMACIÓN:
Métodos tradicionales de educación en occidente
»» Modelo de transmisión.
»» Escuelas religiosas de los siglos 7, 8.
»» Universidades europeas de los siglos 13 y 14.
Educación de calidad
»» Basada en el propósito de la educación y la población a la que se dirige.

»» Escuelas religiosas impartían doctrinas religiosas.
»» Universidades europeas buscan institucionalizar el estatus educativo de los no-
bles.
Educación académica
»» Reservada a las élites.

»» Dirigida a conocimientos en general.
»» Contenido específico y útil para toda la vida.
»» La calidad se definía por la pericia del instructor, y la medición del nivel de apren-
63
dizaje de los estudiantes.
EDUCACIÓN
FORMAL
MÉTODO EDUCACIÓN DE EDUCACIÓN

TRADICIONAL CALIDAD ACADÉMICA
impartido en enfocado
•A las élites.
•Escuelas religiosas. basada en el •A conocimientos generales.
•Universidades europeas. •Contenido específico y útil para
toda la vida.
•Calidad definida por la pericia
del instructor, y la evaluación de
•Propósito de la educación. los estudiantes.
•Población a la que se dirige.
•De tipo religiosa.
•Para Institucionalizar estatus
educativo.
A PRACTICAL PLAN TO END POVERTY

By Jeffrey D. Sachs
Monday, January 17, 2005; Page A17
The Washington post
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A14732-2005Jan16.html
I. Americans know a good deal when they see it. Today a group of leading scientists
and practitioners from several fields --agriculture, medicine, economics, education,
and engineering-- is making a proposal to the world. If rich and poor countries will
adhere to the promises they have made over the past five years to fight extreme
poverty and disease --and rely on the best science and technology in doing so-- the
world can save millions of lives and extricate hundreds of millions of its poorest
people from the trap of extreme poverty. The cost is a mere 50 cents out of every
$100 of rich-world income in the coming decade.
II. The point is simple. Consider malaria, a silent tsunami whose devastation washes
over Africa at a proportion that dwarfs the recent Indian Ocean tsunami. Each month
more than 150,000 African children die of malaria; that’s about the death toll of the
Asian disaster. Yet those deaths do not hurt the public’s mind. On top of the tragedy
and vast economic cost, they contribute to the continent’s population explosion, as
64
impoverished Africans have large families to challenge the ever-present threat.
III. The shock is that malaria, unlike an Indian Ocean earthquake, is largely preventa-
ble and utterly treatable. There is no excuse for the millions of malaria deaths that
will occur this year. A $5 dollar mosquito bed net specially treated with insecticide,
used widely throughout rural Africa, could dramatically lower the rate of malaria
illness and death. Effective medicines, at roughly $1 per dose, could treat the cases
that slip by the bed nets. Yet Africa’s poverty is so extreme that rural farm families
know about the bed nets and the medicines but can’t afford the few dollars they
would cost.
IV. Today’s report of the Millennium Project, an independent advisory group to the
United Nations, shows that just $2 to $3 per American and other citizens of the rich
world would be needed each year to mount an effective fight against malaria. The
rich world’s actual spending to fight malaria is closer to 20 cents per person per
year.
V. The report, “Investing in Development,” doesn’t stop at malaria, though controlling

it might be the greatest bargain on the planet. The project’s scientists explain how
special “fertilizer trees” could replenish Africa’s soil nutrients and lead to a doubling
or tripling of food crop yields in just a few years, enabling farmers to grow more food
more reliably and break free of famine. Using these and other cost-effective modern
tools, Africa could have its own “green revolution,” as Asia did some decades ago. As
in Asia, food security in Africa would be a prelude to sustained economic growth.

VI. This study documents how emergency obstetrical care could be provided at local
clinics even in impoverished settings, saving hundreds of thousands of mothers who
will die in childbirth this year because of obstructed labor and other complications.
The project similarly documents how the introduction of low-cost, nutritionally ba-
lanced school meals, using locally produced foods, could improve the health, nutri-
tion, school attendance and performance of more than 100 million children in the
world’s poorest countries.
VII. Taken together, these and similar steps would change the face of extreme pover-
ty -- indeed, put the world on a path to eliminate it in this generation. Yet these steps
are not taken. The United States and most other donor countries don’t give even 50
cents out of every hundred dollars of income to these causes, in public or in private
contributions. The actual amounts are closer to 20 cents per hundred dollars, and
they are not well targeted on the basic investments to end poverty.

VIII. Why don’t we invest more? The reason is not stinginess but the lack of recog-
nition of what we could accomplish if we really put our minds to it. Americans think
that we give much more than we do. They also believe, erroneously, that corruption
in poor countries blocks effective use of aid, even though dozens of impoverished
countries are rather well governed yet still starved of help.
IX. The outpouring of grief and generosity after Asia’s disaster shows that Americans
are ready -- even yearning -- to contribute to save lives and livelihoods. Here are
65
three steps for an American response to today’s report:

X. First, the president, with Republican and Democratic leaders of Congress, should
call upon all of us to act to combat the silent tsunamis such as malaria, hunger, mater-
nal mortality and extreme poverty that grip Africa and other impoverished regions,
including parts of our own hemisphere. They should endorse the report’s “practical
plan” to combat these horrendous but ultimately solvable scourges.

XI. Second, just as the White House and Congress finally did with Africa’s AIDS pan-
demic, our leaders should do the arithmetic properly. Instead of symbolic and un-
derfunded programs to fight extreme poverty in Africa and elsewhere, they should
calculate and put before the American people the amounts that are truly needed.
Today’s study precisely shows that the financial conclusions are not frightening: just
one-half percent of our annual income. At around $60 billion total from the United
States, this is a tiny fraction of, say, our annual military spending, now around $450
billion, and a vital investment in our national security.

XII. Third, the president should call on Americans to get involved, as he did with
AIDS in 2003 and with the tsunami last month. The upcoming State of the Union
address is the place to start. The president should lead our great nation to use our
wealth and technology to help conquer the scourges of malaria and hunger that grip
hundreds of millions of our impoverished brethren around the world. We all know
that unaddressed suffering adds greatly to instability and insecurity throughout the
world. Americans yearn to act.
The writer leads the U.N. Millennium Project and is director of the Earth Institute at
Columbia University.
Ejercicio 1. Formen equipos de trabajo y cada uno debe elegir un tema.
1. Enfermedades
2. Hambre
3. Maternidad segura
66
Ejercicio 2. Selecciona y clasifica la información referente a tu tema en el siguiente diagrama.
Ejercicio 3. Formen equipos con un integrante de cada tema. Después clasifica la información de cada tema
en el siguiente diagrama.
Ejercicio 4. Comenta tus respuestas con el grupo.
67
UNIDAD II
LECTURA
ÓPTIMA
TEMA 15: CAUSALIDAD I
Objetivo: Al término de este tema serás capaz de identificar las relaciones causales a partir de la localiza-
ción de conectores y palabras de causalidad discriminando las causas de los efectos.
Una de las habilidades más preciadas por un buen lector es su capacidad para reconocer e interpretar las
relaciones de causa efecto que se desarrollan en un texto, ya que estas son las que nos permiten apreciar
la intención de un autor y su forma de concebir el mundo.
Generalmente no encontramos relaciones univocas de causa-efecto, además de que es necesario conocer
los marcadores de estas relaciones causales para poder entender los conceptos que un autor plasma en
su texto.
En esta ocasión el marcador de causalidad que vamos a estudiar es el enlace de ideas a partir de conecto-
res. En el tema: “El papel de los conectores en la relación entre enunciados”, vimos como la función de los
conectores afecta la manera en que se relacionan dos enunciados. Ahora vamos a localizar los conectores
que aparecen en el texto Seeking the Apocalypse para analizar si los conectores forman relaciones de causa
o efecto.
Ejercicio 1. Localiza las relaciones causales y decide si son de causa o efecto.
SEEKING THE APOCALYPSE
XXIV. Due to mass illiteracy and a multitude of calendars, most in the Christian
world didn’t know that the first millennium was approaching. Contrary to myths,
the year 1000 prompted no widespread panic or trembling in the churches. His-
torians did not find evidence that anyone thought the world would do anything
but continue.
XXV. Roughly 120 asteroids at least one-half mile (one kilometer) in diameter cross
Earth’s orbit, as do hundreds of comets such as Swift-Tuttle, which has a diame-
ter of roughly 15 miles (25 kilometers) across and travels at about 130,000 miles
(209,170 kilometers) per hour. If a body of this size hit the Earth at full speed, fires
would blacken the sky, much plant life would die, and—experts estimate—at least
a billion people would die, largely from famine. Could impact with a huge object
extinguish all human life? It depends on our adaptability. Tiny mammals adapted
to whatever killed the dinosaurs.
XXVI. There is also a growing popularity for eco-pessimism, a belief that humans—
through such actions as ozone depletion and global warming—are destroying the
world. (The ultimate anthem of eco-pessimism is the bumper sticker, “Save the
Planet, Kill Yourself.”)
XXVII. Do we need apocalyptic scenarios? If so, why? The answer is that these
scenarios fill a vacuum left by the secularization of life. We could be creating—or
discouraging—scientific scenarios to replace religious apocalyptic myths. Many
religions have a story about destruction of the human race—usually by a flood.
69
We all know about the flood and Noah; a similar story appears in Maya mytho-
logy; and in Greek mythology, Zeus, angry that Prometheus had stolen fire and
given it to mankind, decided to destroy everyone with a great flood.
XXVIII. According to researchers, one-third of all plant and animal species in the
United States are at risk. Signs of trouble are not hard to find. In northern Mexi-
co, Euphydrayas editha butterflies are disappearing. All over the world, frogs are
dying. Is the cause pollution and global warming? Are we humans next?
XXIX. As previous extinctions document, elimination of species is a part of nature.

Experts estimate that of the 30 billion species that have existed since the evolu-
tion of multicellular life, only 10 to 100 million still exist; 99 percent are extinct.
Mammals moved to the top of the food chain because dinosaurs disappeared.
Empires around the year 1000 that collapsed
XXX. Empires around the year 1000 that collapsed fascinate me. Baghdad was
a major cultural center with a population of several hundred thousand; by the
1300s, it was desolate. The largest settlement in North America, Cahokia, located
just below where the Missouri River flows into the Mississippi River, had as many
as 40,000 people, more than most European cities at the time. By the 1400s it had
disappeared.
XXXI. The most dramatic example to me is China’s Song dynasty. It controlled

roughly one quarter of Earth’s population in the year 1000. The Song had gunpow-
der and movable type when no one else in the world had them.
XXXII. In A.D. 1000 in Europe a horse with horseshoes cost twice the amount of
a similar horse with no shoes. Why? Europeans had only sporadic production of
cast iron in the 14th century.
70
Ejercicio 3. Clasifica las relaciones causales de acuerdo a las siguientes categorías.
CONECTOR RELACIÓN SUSTENTACIÓN
71
TEMA 16: HIPÓTESIS I - PREDICCIÓN
Objetivo: Al término de este tema serás capaz de recuperar información de su conocimiento sobre el tema.
La predicción es una estrategia que pertenece a la lectura de familiarización y se lleva a cabo de manera previa
a la lectura, por lo que está principalmente apoyada en el conocimiento previo que el lector tenga del tema a
leer.
PREDICCIÓN
con apoyo en
CONOCIMIENTO PREVIO FORMULACIÓN DE HIPÓTESIS

DEL TEMA
utilizando
ELEMENTOS TIPOGRÁFICOS
ELEMENTOS ICONOGRÁFICOS
Se puede llevar a cabo la predicción de un texto completo o de parte de él. Por supuesto la información que se
obtiene del título es importante, sin embargo, el título no siempre refleja el contenido del texto, por lo que es
importante apoyarse en otros elementos, tanto tipográficos como iconográficos, a partir de ellos se formulan
hipótesis que se comprueban posteriormente al leer la información presentada en el texto.
Ejercicio 1. Lee el siguiente título y formula algunas hipótesis sobre el contenido del texto.
Extraterrestrial plate tectonics?
La palabra extraterrestre nos lleva a pensar en fenómenos que suceden fuera del planeta Tierra.
¿Qué significa plate tectonics? Seguramente está relacionado con la estructura de la capa tectónica o corteza
que cubre la superficie de un cuerpo, por ejemplo la corteza de un árbol. Pero como la temática corresponde
a cuerpos celestes, podemos inferir que el texto se refiere a la corteza terrestre; tomando en cuenta el título
que se me presenta aparentemente existen otras en distintos cuerpos celestes.
Ahora veamos la fotografía que aparece a continuación:

La fotografía muestra una explosión volcánica, captada de Io, una de las lunas de Júpiter. Esto me permite
confirmar la hipótesis, pues la palabra extraterrestre se refiere a Io.
72
A continuación te presentamos el texto correspondiente al título anterior.
The Earth may be unique in our solar

system because it appears to be the
only planet that is still volcanically
and tectonically active; our planet
therefore remains very much alive,
while the others apparently have long
ceased activity. Volcanic activity re-
quires a source of internal heat, and
it is the escape of this heat that fuels
plate tectonics. While volcanism pla-
yed a major role in the early history of A volcanic plume of sulfur dioxide (SO2) gas rising
Mars, the Moon, and probably Mer- about 150 km above the surface of Io. This computer-
enhanced image was captured “live” by the Voyager
cury, their small sizes relative to Earth 2 spacecraft on 4 March 1979. (Imagery courtesy of
resulted in the loss of internal heat at NASA).
a much faster rate. They have been in-
active globes for the last billion years or so.
La predicción que pude llevar a cabo a partir del título y la imagen me permite comprender mejor el texto, aho-
ra sé que la Luna, Marte y posiblemente Mercurio son cuerpos que no tienen actividad ni tectónica ni volcánica
de acuerdo con la información presentada.
¿Has estado presente durante algún temblor?

___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
¿Qué recuerdas de él?

___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
Trata de recordar el fenómeno como un observador de otro planeta, ¿Cómo lo des-

cribirías?
___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
73
Ejercicio 3. Lee los siguientes títulos y formula algunas hipótesis sobre el contenido de los textos.
TEXTO 1
Do tiny electrical signals herald an earthquake?
___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
TEXTO 2
Maths shakes up quake forecasts
___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
___________________________________________________________
EARTHQUAKES REPORT:
Do tiny electrical signals herald an earthquake?
By Fred Pearce
Evidence is mounting that earthquakes can be predicted, perhaps weeks in advance,

by measuring electric currents in the Earth’s crust, says a Greek researcher.
The controversial claim follows the apparently successful prediction in 1995 of three
quakes along previously dormant faults in Greece by Panayiotis Varotsos, a physicist
at the University of Athens, (New Scientist, 1 March 1997, p 34). Varotsos had strung
wire across the Greek landscape connecting buried electrodes to pick up electrical
signals. These voltmeters measured short-lived electric currents in the days before
quakes. This seemed to confirm Varotsos’s theory that the stressed rocks can create
currents that can be detected at the surface.
But most seismologists were skeptical about his claims, so Varotsos went back to the
lab to find out more. He reports in this month’s Journal of Applied Physics (vol 83, p
60) that he gradually stressed rocks such as granite until they fractured. Just before
fracture, he says, the rocks generated currents of a few nanoamperes-a figure that
Varotsos says squares with measurements in the field.
The practical value of the findings, if confirmed, is unclear. ‘Seismic electric signals
will only be detectable at selected sites,’ Varotsos admits. The currents he has clai-
med to pick up are conducted almost entirely along fault lines and then have their
74
fields magnified a thousand times or more in certain surrounding rocks. Moreover,
a signal might only appear at a single site hundreds of kilometers away from the
quake’s epicenter, giving little useful information.
EARTHQUAKES REPORT:
MATHS SHAKES UP QUAKE FORECASTS
By Robert Matthews
From New Scientist, 10 January 1998, Volume 157, Issue 2116
I. Earthquake forecasters have got their assumptions wrong, say geophysicists in Los
Angeles, who have been studying the maths of quakes. Their results could mean the
chances of a major quake hitting an area diminishes as time goes by, rather than
increasing as has always been assumed. While most geophysicists have given up pre-
dicting the exact timing and location of a quake, the objective of estimating the chan-
ces of one striking in a given period is still being pursued. The assumption has been
that the longer the time since the last major quake, the sooner the next will strike.
The reasoning is intuitive: quakes occur because the slow grinding of the Earth’s tec-
tonic plates causes a steady build-up of stresses within them, until the rock fractures.
So analysis of seismic records to discover how the chances of a major quake ‘grow’
with time should make a broad-brush forecast of the next quake possible.

II. But now Didier Sornette and Leon Knopoff, geophysicists at the University of Ca-
lifornia, have cast severe doubts on this approach with their new analysis, about
to appear in the Bulletin of the Seismological Society of America. They have shown
that the chances of the next quake occurring need not increase with time at all,
but can stay the same or even decrease. Their research is based on an application
of Bayes’s theorem, which shows how the probability of a future event is affected
by past events. ‘Estimates of the time to the next event depend on what we know
about the fluctuations in interval times between events,’ says Sornette. The nature
of these fluctuations is captured by what is known as the probability density of the
time intervals between the quakes.
III. In some areas, small earthquakes occur roughly periodically, giving a simple pro-
bability density that leads to quakes becoming more probable as time passes. But
in other regions, the probability density appears to follow a Poisson distribution. In
this case, say Sornette and Knopoff, their analysis shows that the chances of ano-
ther quake remain constant with time: it makes no difference when the last quake
struck.
IV. More bizarrely, they found that other probability densities imply that quakes ac-
tually become less likely the more time that passes without one. One such proba-
bility density is a log-normal distribution, which scientists had previously suggested
applies to earthquake-prone southern California. The researchers suspect that this
pattern may appear in regions where the motions of many faults are influencing each
other.

V. Sornette and Knopoff warn, however, that the probability densities are easily mis-
calculated. Depending on the time frame used as a sample, they say, the seismic
75
records can be used to justify various probability densities. ‘The conclusion is very
sensitive to the assumptions about the fluctuations in interval times,’ says Sornette.

VI. He suggests that geophysicists should try to analyze the timings and locations of
many earthquakes over a wide area to find the correct probability density. ‘I think we
have obtained essentially the maximum we can get out of the usual approach, which
looks at just the time distribution of quakes,’ he says.

VII. Ian Main, an expert on seismic risk analysis at Edinburgh University, says: “These
results are timely as research moves away from the Holy Grail of the prediction of
individual earthquakes to ultimately more useful predictions of their probability of
occurrence”.
From New Scientist, 05 June 1997, Volume 154, Issue 2086
Ejercicio 4. Completa la tabla con las formas de predicción de temblores y los resultados que se obtienen.
# FORMA DE PREDICCIÓN DE RESULTADOS OBTENIDOS

TEMBLORES
76
TEMA 17: HIPÓTESIS II - INFERENCIA
Objetivo: Al término de este tema serás capaz de recordar los puntos principales de su lectura para hacer
deducciones e inferir información que leerá más adelante o la posible conclusión de un texto.
A diferencia de la predicción, donde se elaboran hipótesis de manera previa a la lectura de un texto, la inferen-
cia se lleva a cabo después de la lectura.
La inferencia también se lleva a cabo a partir de hipótesis, pero éstas están basadas en la información que
presenta el texto, y su función es inferir los posibles resultados o acciones que se derivan de la información
presentada.
no confundir
INFERENCIA TEXTUAL PREDICCIÓN
a partir de con la
se toma en cuenta INFORMACIÓN

TODA PARTE DE LA FACTUAL
INFORMACIÓN CONTENIDA RELEVANTE
EN EL TEXTO
se establecen
tomando en cuenta RELACIONES CAUSALES

SOBRE LA INFORMACIÓN
QUE SE INFIERE
se localizan
ESLABONES QUE ANTECEDEN O
PROCEDEN A LA INFORMACIÓN
CAUSAS Y EFECTOS
SOBRE LA QUE SE ESTÁ
PRESENTES EN EL
TRABAJANDO POR MEDIO DE se infieren
TEXTO
HIPÓTESIS
La inferencia de un texto se puede llevar a cabo de manera parcial; tomando como base párrafos o bloques
para inferir el curso que tomará la información que sigue, o de manera total, haciendo hipótesis de las posibles
acciones o consecuencias que se deriven de la información presentada. Por supuesto, para lograr lo anterior,
es fundamental el conocimiento previo del tema que se está leyendo, y un buen manejo de la estrategia de
generalización de la información.
Para tener una idea más clara del procedimiento para lograr la inferencia del significado de las palabras, traba-
jaremos con un texto llamado Mercurial Storms Rage in the Arctic:
Lee el siguiente párrafo.
77
A toxic rain of mercury falls on the Arctic every spring, a study by researchers in Ca-
nada suggests. They say chemical reactions similar to those that destroy ozone are
turning mercury vapor in the atmosphere into particles that fall to Earth.
¿Qué podemos inferir de lo anterior? El texto podría continuar con:
a) La descripción del proceso de destrucción del ozono.

b) La forma en que el mercurio se transforma de vapor en partículas.
c) La procedencia del vapor de mercurio.
Lee el siguiente párrafo para desechar o confirmar nuestras hipótesis.
Mercury, alone among major heavy-metal pollutants, has a boiling point low enough
for it to be blown around the world as a gas. Mercury vapor is widespread in the
atmosphere especially at the poles, and concentrations are believed to have more
than tripled in the past two centuries. Most of it comes from coal burning, waste
incineration and other types of combustion.
Se puede confirmar que la hipótesis “c” es la correcta. Continúa leyendo el texto.
Bill Schroeder of the government research agency Environment Canada has been
measuring concentrations of gaseous mercury in the air at Alert, the atmospheric
monitoring station on Ellesmere Island, Canada’s most northerly island. He started
in the summer of 1994, taking measurements every five minutes. Levels remained
boringly constant for nine months, until late March the following year when “all hell
broke loose”, says Leonard Barrie, Schroeder’s colleague.
Podríamos hacer las siguientes inferencias a partir de él:
a) La descripción de un desequilibrio en el patrón de medidas.

b) Malas noticias, especialmente por la expresión “when all hell broke loose”.
Lee completo el texto para verificar las hipótesis.
The amount of gaseous mercury in the air over alert plummeted, then rose and
plummeted again many times. “Bill thought his instruments might be broken, so
he replaced them and waited a whole year to check the results the next spring. It
was the same again.” This time Schroeder also measured particulate mercury--and
discovered that mercury was being transformed from a gas to a solid.
Al parecer, ambas hipótesis se confirmaron, pues el texto describe la variación de medidas y una transforma-
ción importante del mercurio.
Leamos la siguiente sección del texto:
The reaction seems to take place in the “boundary layer”, stretching from the
Earth’s surface to a kilometer or so up, Schroeder told a conference on Arctic po-
llution held in Tromso, Norway, earlier this month. Barrie and Schroeder have yet
to demonstrate why the phase change is so rapid. But the pattern almost exactly
mimics the timing of ozone depletion and they predict that similar processes drive
78
both. Springtime ozone destruction occurs mostly in the stratosphere, but it is known
to take place in the boundary layer too, driven by the same photochemical reactions
involving chlorine and bromine atoms. These atoms come from man-made chemicals
and from sea salt trapped in the icepack and released when the sun returns after the
polar winter.
Por lo que dice el autor, ahora sabemos cómo se pierde la capa de ozono, podemos suponer que el mercurio
en forma sólida daña el ecosistema, y seguramente el autor nos dirá como sucede:
“Our guess is that the mercury reacts with the chlorine and bromine to produce mer-
curic chloride and bromide,” says Barrie. “These compounds are less volatile than
elemental mercury, and so would condense out and form particles.” Barrie warns
that the intense springtime fallout of mercury occurs just when ecosystems are pre-
paring for a spring flush of activity, and are likely to absorb the toxic metal. Mercury
levels in Arctic ecosystems are high and continuing to rise.
To plot the mercury fallout across Canada, government scientists are this summer
coordinating a nationwide collection of snow by students. They particularly want to
see whether there is more mercury further north, following the pattern of ozone
depletion.
From New Scientist, 21 June 1997.
La hipótesis elaborada se confirmó, sin embargo, el daño que el mercurio causa al ecosistema es más grave de
lo que la inferencia aportó.
Como puedes observar, la inferencia puede guiar nuestra lectura y ayudarnos a comprender mejor el texto,
nos permite interactuar con el autor y nos aporta información muy útil que nos ayudará a comprender mejor
lo que leemos.
Lee los siguientes textos y responde los ejercicios que le siguen.
LIGHTNING SHARPENS ACID RAIN’S BITE

[Archive: 31 May 1997]
By Vincent Kiernan, Washington DC
I. It’s not just milk that turns sour when lightning strikes. A geologist in Athens, Geor-
gia, has found that acid rain becomes nastier during thunderstorms, when lightning
generates reactive chemicals that speed up acid production in the atmosphere.

II. Bruce Railsback of the University of Georgia discovered the relationship while
studying how the acidity of rainfall changes during a storm. “Studies of rainfall pH
have typically used sampling intervals of one day or longer,” he says. “Variation of pH
within rainfall events has received little attention”.

III. Last year, during 14 storms in northeastern Georgia, Railsback gathered 132 sam-
ples of falling rain at intervals as short as 90 seconds apart. Many were collected
when thunder was rumbling in the sky, showing that lightning must have flashed
within about 25 kilometers of the sampling site, whether it was visible or not.

79
IV. In the current issue of The Science of the Total Environment (Vol. 198, p 233),
Railsback reports that the samples he collected while he could hear thunder had an
average pH of 3•63. That was sharply more acidic than the 4•05 average for rain that
fell when the skies were silent.
V. Sulphur dioxide pollution from power stations, cars and lorries is the main source
of acidity in rain. When the gas meets highly reactive chemicals such as ozone and
hydroxyl ions, it is oxidized to form sulphur trioxide. Combined with water, this gas
forms sulphuric acid. Nitrogen oxide pollution from cars and lorries also creates acid
rain, when it is oxidized to form nitric acid. Both acids fall in rain and snow.

VI. Railsback says that the reason rain becomes more acidic during thunderstorms is
probably that lightning can increase the production of the reactive chemicals that are
needed to oxidize the pollutants. This fits in with earlier studies that have suggested
that lightning generates high levels of ozone. “Lightning presumably contributes to
the lower pH of summer rainfall in the eastern US,” Railsback adds.

VII. Railsback also noticed that the pH of samples collected during the day was on
average lower than for those collected during the night. This must be because sun-
light, which also speeds up the production of oxidants, makes rain more acidic.

VIII. Railsback adds that in a single storm, the pH of rainwater could change over
periods of an hour or less. “There seems to be some process going on that is faster
than anything that we presently recognize,” he says. “I’ll be the first to admit that I
don’t know what it is.”
From New Scientist, 31 May 1997
POLLUTION MAY LEAD TO A LIFE OF CRIME

By Alison Motluk E.
I. Environmental pollution makes a big contribution to violent crime and antisocial

behavior, according to a provocative new analysis by an American political scientist.
He believes that toxic chemicals, in particular metals in water supplies, can disrupt
the neurological control mechanisms that normally inhibit our violent urges. Other
experts are intrigued but want to see more evidence.

II. Conventional theories link crime with social, economic and psychological factors.
But Roger Masters of Dartmouth College in Hanover, New Hampshire, says that these
factors cannot fully explain why some counties in the US have only 100 violent crimes
per 100 000 people each year, while others have over 3000. Data on environmental
pollution can account for a lot of the remaining variation, he claims.

III. Masters analyzed a wide range of statistics including crime figures from the FBI
and information on industrial discharges of lead and manganese, both into water and
into the atmosphere, compiled by the Environmental Protection Agency.
IV. After controlling for conventional variables such as income and population den-
sity, he found that environmental pollution seems to have an independent effect on
80
the rate of violent crimes--defined as homicide, aggravated assault, sexual assault
and robbery. Counties with the highest levels of lead and manganese pollution typi-
cally have crime rates three times the national average, says Masters. “The presence
of pollution is as big a factor as poverty,” says Masters, whose analysis will appear as
a chapter in the book Environmental Toxicology, to be issued later this year by the
publisher Gordon and Breach.

V. When brain chemistry is altered by exposure to toxic metals, Masters argues, our
natural violent urges may no longer be restrained. “It’s the breakdown of the inhibi-
tion mechanism that’s the key to violent behavior,” he claims.

VI. Masters points to experiments on cell cultures which have shown that lead partly
incapacitates glial cells, which are responsible for “housekeeping” in the brain,
mopping up unwanted chemicals (New Scientist, 5 February 1994). And in people
suffering from calcium deficiency, which afflicts some of America’s poorest citizens,
manganese inhibits the uptake of the neurotransmitters serotonin and dopamine in
parts of the brain. These chemicals are known to control impulsive behavior.

VII. Masters thinks that a major source of lead and manganese is the pipes that carry
water to houses. Soils contaminated with lead and other toxins may also contribute,
he says.

VIII. Alastair Hay, a chemical pathologist at the University of Leeds, says that Masters’s
theory is plausible, but notes that people who live in areas of high toxic discharges do
not necessarily absorb more toxins.
IX. “This quite likely has something in it,” says Ken Pease, director of the Applied Cri-
minology Research Unit at the University of Huddersfield. “But I think the approach
badly needs individual level data to nail it down.”
From New Scientist, 31 May 1997
Ejercicio 1. Formula 5 hipótesis para cada texto justificando cada una de ellas.
Lightning sharpens acid rain’s bite

Hipótesis Confirmación
81
Pollution may lead to a life of crime
Hipótesis Confirmación
¿Qué tienen en común los tres textos presentados aquí?
____________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________
¿Qué diferencias en la información encuentras al comparar los tres textos?
____________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________
82
¿Cómo clasificarías estos textos?
____________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________
Ejercicio 3. Elabora un cuadro sinóptico sobre los efectos de los metales tóxicos en los seres vivos, retoman-
do ambos textos.
83
TEMA 18: INFORMACIÓN RELEVANTE
Objetivo: Al término de este tema serás capaz de localizar información pertinente a partir de un objetivo de
lectura dado.
En la mayoría de los textos encontramos que existe información irrelevante que podemos separar de la in-
formación que necesitamos. No es posible dar una regla generalizadora que nos indique qué información
debemos eliminar, pues esto dependerá de los objetivos que marcan nuestra lectura. Es importante conservar
el eje conceptual de la información; esto es, el enunciado tópico, ya que los conceptos de una información no
son eliminables.
Cuando se elimina información irrelevante generalmente toma forma de detalles de apoyo, y repetimos, lo
que conservemos de información dependerá de los objetivos de la lectura. Observa el siguiente mapa con-
ceptual.
OBTENCIÓN DE
INFORMACIÓN
RELEVANTE
localizar
ORACIÓN TÓPICO conservar conservar DETALLES DE

APOYO
DE ACUERDO
aislar CON OBJETIVO desechar
DE LECTURA
EJE CONCEPTUAL
LO REDUNDANTE:
LOS EJEMPLOS:
aislar COMENTARIOS AL
MARGEN
EN FORMA DE :
Enunciado
Notas aislar
Esquema redactar información
resultante
unir con INFORMACIÓN

RELEVANTE
84
Después de leer el texto anterior, podrás advertir que el extracto de texto es el diario de un explorador, en él
nos explica el equipo que necesitaba para escalar una montaña. Si nuestro objetivo de lectura es saber el pro-
cedimiento que uso el explorador nos quedaríamos con la primera hoja del diario. Si lo que deseamos es llevar
a cabo una acción similar, entonces las hojas dos y tres del diario serían más importantes para mi propósito de
lectura.
Elige la información que necesites del texto que se presenta, según cualquiera de los siguientes objetivos:
»» Eres un estudiante de historia y te interesa tener información sobre los usos y

costumbres de los incas.
»» Eres un explorador y necesitas información de los procedimientos más recomen-

dables para llevar a cabo una exploración a una montaña escabrosa de forma segura.
»» Eres un estudiante de arqueología y estás interesado en los hallazgos relaciona-

dos con las culturas prehispánicas.
Ejercicio 1. Lee los siguientes fragmentos de texto y determina a cuál de los tres personajes podría interesar-
le la información que se presenta en los siguientes recuadros. Escribe tu respuesta a un costado del texto.
Comenta con tu grupo los resultados para que puedas tener toda la información que obtuvieron tus compañe-
ros que eligieron otros objetivos.
85
86
87
88
89
TEMA 19: INFORMACIÓN FACTUAL
Objetivo: Al término de este tema serás capaz de reconocer información avalada y confirmada y discriminarla
de una mera opción.
La información factual es información que se puede comprobar o bien, sólo se trata de la opinión del autor. Es
importante buscar la información que respalda la veracidad de los datos proporcionados por el autor. Si no se
encuentran en el texto, es muy posible que el autor sólo este formulando hipótesis o expresando su opinión.
MODELOS DE ESTRATEGIA DE LECTURA

INFORMACIÓN
FACTUAL OPINIÓN
a nivel
entonces entonces
CONCEPTOS
PRINCIPALES
Ó
TEMA CENTRAL
se buscan
-DATOS ESTADÍSTICOS
-FOTOGRAFÍAS
-DESCRIPCIONES EN
DOCUMENTOS VÁLIDOS
-ANÁLISIS DE
LABORATORIO
-DATOS
COMPROBABLES
si se verifica si
PROCEDEN EL AUTOR ESTIMA O

DIRECTAMENTE SUGIERE QUE PUEDEN
DEL OBJETO PERTENECER AL
O CONCEPTO OBJETO O
DESCRITO CONCEPTO
90
Ejercicio 1. Identifica cuál es información factual y cuál es opinión del autor.
THE CAVITY OF HEAVEN?

SALZBURG
I. Mozart died on December 5 1791 at the age of 35. It

is thought that he was buried the day after his death in a
pauper’s grave under snow and rain. Neither his wife nor
any of his friends attended the funeral, so it was never
learnt exactly where the grave was.

II. Many years later, however, word got round that the
composer’s skull had been discovered. A gravedigger at the St Marx cemetery, where Mozart
was buried, had given the skull as a present to an artist, Jacob Hyrtl, in 1842. Hyrtl’s brother, a
professor on anatomy, took an interest in it, and cut off the base of the skull to examine the bony
ear; since then, both the base and the lower jaw have gone missing. The two brothers were so
convinced that the skull was authentic that they made no further investigations; but when the
object eventually found its way to Salzburg, in 1921, expert opinion banished it to deep storage.

III. Now Gottfried Tichy, a paleontologist at the University of Salzburg, has looked at the skull
again. He was highly skeptical that it was Mozart’s, but there had never been a proper forensic
examination. He has catalogued his findings for The Economist:The skull is small and short, with
a more or less round circumference, typical of the South German race. It belonged to a slight
unmuscular young man, aged between 25 and 40.

V. The attrition of the teeth suggests an age of 30-35. (Mozart himself wrote that he was only a
small person, and Nissen reported in 1828 that his head was rather large compared to his body.)
The circumference of the skull is 50.8cm and the bones are extremely thin. The capacity of the
brain case, 1,585 cubic centimeters, is relatively large.

VI. One portrait of Mozart, painted by Dorothea Stock, has the same profile as the skull. The
round face, the two bosses of the forehead, the relatively long nose and the protruding upper jaw
are all consistent (for what it is worth) with contemporary paintings and drawings.

VII. A faint fracture, 7.2cm long, runs from the left temple to the crown of the head. It is comple-
tely healed, but has left traces of bleeding just beneath the skull. Healing would probably have
taken more than a year, and the fracture is likely to have been a factor in Mozart’s death. He told
his mason-brother Puchberg in April and May 1790 that he was suffering from headache and
toothache; and a letter of Da Ponte’s of August 1791, which exists only as a copy, mentions that
he was dizzy (“ho il capo frastornato”). Most probably the death of Mozart can be explained as a
later consequence of the haematoma, together with an infectious disease.
VIII. Professor Tichy makes no claim to infallibility. His report ends with a suggestive coda: “All
this, the myths and legends about the death of Mozart, are the theme of a documentary film to
be shown in 1991.”
THE ECONOMIST MARCH 3 1990
91
Ejercicio 2. Completa las tablas con la información que se te solicita.
INFORMACIÓN FACTUAL OPINIÓN
92
Ejercicio 3. Compara la información de las tablas y relaciónalas.
INFORMACIÓN SOBRE EL CRÁNEO DEL INFORMACIÓN SOBRE EL CRÁNEO DE

CEMENTERIO MOZART
93
INFORMACIÓN SOBRE INFORMACIÓN SOBRE EL
PROBLEMAS DE SALUD Y LA MUERTE HALLAZGO Y TRAYECTORIA DEL
DE MOZART CRÁNEO ENCONTRADO
94
1. ¿Dónde fue sepultado Mozart?

____________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________
2. ¿Quién conocía el lugar donde fue sepultado Mozart?

____________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________
3. ¿Cuántos años pasaron entre su muerte y el hallazgo del cráneo?

____________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________
4. ¿Dónde nació Mozart?

____________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________
5. ¿De qué murió Mozart?

____________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________
6. El cráneo encontrado ¿Es de Mozart?

____________________________________________________________________
____________________________________________________________________
NOTA:
Ahora que ya tienes la información organizada en los cuadros fíjate como la información factual se presenta
en dos partes, la información factual sobre Mozart y la que corresponde al cráneo, aunque los datos de los dos
temas son factuales no se relacionan, el autor nos presenta la información de tal manera que pareciera que el
cráneo es el de Mozart, la clave está en que Mozart fue enterrado en una fosa común, nadie sabe en donde
fue enterrado, nadie fue a su entierro y el cráneo fue desenterrado 50 años después.
95
TEMA 20: CAUSALIDAD II
Objetivo: Al término de este tema serás capaz de aplicar los conocimientos sobre causalidad del Tema 6
para encontrar relaciones causales complejas, a partir de su conocimiento sobre temporalidad y sobre
clasificación para resumir los argumentos de un autor.
CADENAS CAUSALES

Las relaciones causales se encuentran en todo tipo de textos y son fundamentales para comprender antece-
dentes y consecuencias de los hechos presentados en un escrito. Analiza el siguiente mapa conceptual.
RELACIONES DE
CAUSALIDAD
desconfiar
de
tipos
EXPERIENCIAS
COTIDIANAS,
UNIDIRECCIONAL FENÓMENOS QUE
CAUSA-EFECTO APARENTAN SER
indispensable CASUALES
LOCALIZACIÓN
MÚLTIPLES DEL OBJETO DE
CAUSAS CON UN LA ACCIÓN A
EFECTO ANALIZAR
QUE ACCIONES
LLEVA A CABO
MÚLTIPLES
EFECTOS CON UNA
CAUSA HACIA QUE SE
sobre el objeto se
DIRIGEN ESAS
debe considerar
ACCIONES
CADENA
CAUSA-EFECTO
CAUSA-EFECTO QUE CAMBIOS
PRODUCEN
MÚLTIPLES CAUSAS
MÚLTIPLES MÚLTIPLES CAUSAS
EFECTOS Y EFECTOS
Las cadenas causales suelen ser muy complejas por una serie de razones; analicemos algunas para entenderlas
mejor:
96
»» Multiplicidad de relaciones entre cadenas causales.
»» Desarrollo en el texto de los efectos dejando la causa implícita.
»» Interferencia de los conocimientos cotidianos al analizar las verdaderas causas de
un acontecimiento.
»» Carencia de conocimiento previo de las condiciones presentadas en un texto.
»» La existencia de cadenas causales de contraste.
Ahora revisemos cada uno de ellos:
MULTIPLICIDAD DE RELACIONES ENTRE CADENAS CAUSALES
Las cadenas causales tienen múltiples maneras de manifestarse. Podemos encontrar cadenas causales unidi-
reccionales, esto es, una causa seguida de un efecto. Este tipo de relación se encuentra en relaciones inmedia-
tas y cotidianas; por ejemplo, recibo un golpe y me duele.
Es muy común encontrar un efecto derivado de causas múltiples. Por ejemplo, la contaminación del ambiente
es un efecto cuyas causas van desde el poco cuidado por el mantenimiento de nuestro medio ambiente hasta
la ignorancia de los resultados de nuestras acciones cotidianas.
También es usual encontrar una causa que desemboca en múltiples efectos; por ejemplo la malnutrición puede
conducir a enfermedades graves, problemas de retención y aprendizaje, incapacidad para llevar a cabo una
labor dada.
Una cadena causa-efecto-causa efecto se presenta por ejemplo cuando hay una sequía, esto lleva a la carencia
de productos agrícolas, lo que a su vez remite a la incapacidad de obtener un beneficio por la venta de los mis-
mos. Lo anterior lleva a la falta de recursos económicos, lo que a su vez ocasiona que no se tenga lo necesario
para sembrar.
La última relación que se tratará aquí es la de múltiples causas, múltiples efectos; por ejemplo, la vida en este
planeta se creó por las condiciones que había en él: la existencia de aminoácidos, una gran cantidad de hidró-
geno y descargas eléctricas; al unirse e interactuar (poco sabemos como) dieron origen a las primeras manifes-
taciones de vida; el resto de la historia es del dominio público.
DESARROLLO DE LOS EFECTOS EN EL TEXTO DEJANDO LA CAUSA IMPLÍCITA
En ocasiones, el autor de un texto da por hecho que nuestro conocimiento del tema es lo suficientemente
amplio como para conocer las causas de un acontecimiento. Así el autor se limita a puntualizar solo el efecto o
efectos que está interesado en describir, dejando para el lector la tarea de encontrar las cadenas causales por
si mismo. En este caso, el texto no puede ayudarnos gran cosa en la aclaración de la información, por lo que
tendremos que recurrir a otra fuente (una enciclopedia, un libro de conceptos fundamentales sobre el tema,
etc. que nos ayude a obtener la información que necesitamos.
INTERFERENCIA DE LOS CONOCIMIENTOS COTIDIANOS PARA ANALIZAR LAS VERDADERAS

CAUSAS DE UN ACONTECIMIENTO
Muchas veces, la sabiduría cotidiana invade el terreno de la ciencia, haciendo difícil comprender fenómenos
que tienen un significado diferente en el mundo de ésta; para no extendernos mucho, basta decir que los con-
ceptos de velocidad y rapidez en física no se entienden de la misma manera que en la vida diaria.
CARENCIA DE CONOCIMIENTO PREVIO DE LAS CONDICIONES PRESENTADAS EN UN TEXTO.
97
Este caso comparte su origen con los dos anteriores, si leemos un texto sobre un tema especializado sin tener
las bases suficientes sobre el mismo, muy probablemente invertiremos el doble de esfuerzo en leerlo, además
de que será poca la información que podamos rescatar de él. Cuando éste sea el caso, se sugiere acudir a un
experto en el tema o buscar textos que contengan los fundamentos del tema en cuestión.
CADENAS CAUSALES DE CONTRASTE
No se debe restar importancia a las cadenas causales de contraste, aquellas que determinan que un fenómeno
no es la causa o efecto de otro, como por ejemplo: un rayo no causa un trueno.
Cuando se buscan las cadenas causales en un texto se debe poner especial atención a los lazos de unión entre
conceptos. Generalmente éstos son conectores de causalidad como serían therefore, so, as, because, since,
due to (cf. unidad de coherencia en este manual). Esto no quiere decir que son las únicas marcas de causalidad,
se debe prestar atención a las palabras de acción, como cause, result; otras veces el autor utilizará nominado-
res como consequences, effects, outcomes, cause, reason, origin, etc.
A pesar de la diversidad de marcadores de causalidad no es difícil encontrar las cadenas causales, porque dis-
ponemos de otras herramientas que ya hemos aprendido y que podemos utilizar para ayudarnos a comprender
el texto; estas herramientas son los elementos tipográficos e iconográficos que presenta el autor, la generación
de hipótesis para predecir o inferir información, el conocimiento de la forma en que los conectores enlazan los
conceptos dentro del texto, la discriminación de información relevante para elaborar las ideas principales, el
reconocimiento de la información factual presentada, entre otras estrategias.
Para descifrar una cadena causal se debe localizar la supuesta causa o efecto y observar cuidadosamente a que
o quien afectan, que cambios producen y como estos cambios repercuten o proceden de la misma.
NOTA: En este ejercicio no se presenta la información completa del artículo por ser demasiado extensa, si se
desea consultarla sugerimos buscarla en Internet, en la dirección indicada.
GLOBAL WARMING…FACT OR FICTION?

By Anthony Marshall
Mayfield High School
1997-1998
Glossary:
Atmosphere. The gaseous mass that surrounds any planet, including Earth. Carbon Dioxide (CO2).
A colorless gas formed when carbon is burned in an adequate supply of air.
Climate Change. The science that studies how the earth’s climate is changing either naturally or
by human involvement.
Ozone (O3). Highly reactive, pale-blue gas with a penetrating odor. It forms a layer in the upper
atmosphere, which protects life on Earth from ultraviolet rays, a cause of skin cancer. At ground
level, O3 can cause asthma attacks, stunted growth in plants, and corrosion of certain materials.
Radiosonde. A small balloon-borne instrument package equipped with a radio transmitter that
measures vertical profiles (soundings) of temperature, pressure, and humidity in the atmosphere.
Greenhouse gases. Gases such as (CO2) responsible for the warming of planet.
98
Discussion
I. Global Warming has received much press in the past decade, especially as the year
2000 approaches and the start of the new millenium. Is what the media, govern-
ment, and environmental activists saying about the topic true? Could the Earth’s cli-
mate really heat up? What are the causes if such a warming occurs? These questions
and more are what climate scientists are asking themselves daily.
II. The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has stated
firmly in their official publications, statements etc. that, “the balance of evidence
suggests a discernible human influence on global climate” This is a powerful sta-
tement coming from the United Nations’ authority on climate change! More than
2,600 leading U.N. scientists have endorsed this conclusion. They claim that with a
rise in global temperatures will come widespread diseases (U.N. projections say 50
million more cases of malaria per year); sea levels will rise above current levels; and
storms, especially hurricanes, will increase in both intensity and frequency.
III. The United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) suggests that global
temperatures are indeed rising. According to the EPA, observations collected over
the last century show that the average land surface temperatures have risen 0.45°C
- 0.6°C in the last century! Greenhouse gases may be to blame for such a rise in tem-
peratures, according to the EPA. They also predict United States temperatures will
rise in the upcoming years (see Figure 1).
Figure 1: EPA’s U.S. Temperature Trends.

Global temperatures have declined slightly, but since the
1970s, they have taken a sharp rise (see figure 2). These
temperatures are not rising at the same rate worldwide.
Evening low temperatures are rising, whereas the dayti-
me highs are remaining nearly stationary.
Figure 2: Global Temperature Changes from 1861-1996.

Source- EPA The National Climatic Data Center (NCDC)
data on global temperature trends seem to agree with
the EPA’s (see Figure 3).
99
IV. The most interesting fact, however, is
that although land-based temperature
data shows a moderate increase, satelli-
te and weather balloon data point to the
contrary! Satellite and weather balloon
derived temperature data match almost
exactly (figure 4c), yet both differ greatly
from the surface or land-based data sets.
As figure 4a illustrates, both the ground-
based data and satellite-measured data
show an annual increase, but the satellite
Figure 3: Global Temperature Trends from 1850-1996.
data differs greatly in respect to tempera-
Source: National Climatic Data Center, NOAA.
ture.

V. The actual increase of ground-based temperatures over the past century is around
0.45°C. This is partially due to a phenomenon known as the “urban heat-island effect”.
The “heat-island effect” is a result of cities acting as a mini greenhouse, capturing the
heat of the day and “storing” it in pavement, buildings, cars, etc. thus releasing the
heat energy during nighttime hours. The NCDC United States minimum temperature
data shows a slight decrease, but overall an increase of evening temperatures near
large cities (see figure 5). The “heat-island effect” can cause a bias of 0.10°C for cities
with a population as low as 10,000 (Macdonald et al). Sources: John Christy, & Roy
W. Spencer.
100
VI. If one were to combine the satellite-measured and ground-based temperature
data (see figure 4a) the temperature increase would be 0.5°C, (Macdonald et al) with
the most significant increase occurring before the 1970s, and before the main increa-
se of carbon dioxide emissions.

VII. Lower tropospheric temperatures obtained from satellites have not shown any
significant increase, and hemispheric satellite data must be considered more repre-
sentative of global temperatures than surface data…which are representative of a
very thin layer of air at the surface (Macdonald et al). This disputes what the IPCC
has stated all along that “ the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human in-
fluence on global climate (IPCC)”. In fact, the evidence suggests no discernible human
influence whatsoever. Satellites and weather balloons perform more accurately in
measuring temperature as compared to ground-based stations because they can do
the following:
1.Measure the integrated air temperature over several thousand feet in the vertical.
2.Measure temperatures at various levels in the atmosphere.
3.Provide nearly complete global coverage in as little as a day.
Ejercicio 1. Analiza las siguientes cadenas causales y decide de qué tipo de causa o efecto se trata:
a. Unidireccional
b. Causas múltiples un efecto
c. Efectos múltiples una causa
d. Cadena causa-efecto
e. Múltiple causa/efecto
f. Cadenas causales de contraste
Número Concepto Causa/ Tipo

de párrafo efecto
“The balance of evidence sug-

1. gests a discernible human in-
fluence on global climate”.
With a rise in global tempera-
tures: will come widespread di-
seases sea levels will rise above
2. current levels; storms, especia-
lly hurricanes, will increase in
both intensity and frequency.
Greenhouse gases may be to
3. blame for such a rise in tempe-
ratures.
101
The increase of ground-based
4. temperatures is partially due to
a phenomenon known as the
“urban heat-island effect”.
The “heat-island effect” is a
result of cities acting as a mini
greenhouse, capturing the heat
5. of the day and “storing” it in
pavement, buildings, cars, etc.
thus releasing the heat energy
during nighttime hours.
The “heat-island effect” can

cause a bias of 0.10° C for ci-
6. ties with a population as low as
10,000.
“ The balance of evidence su-
ggests a discernible human
7. influence on global climate
(IPCC)”.
8. “ The balance of evidence su-

ggests a discernible human
influence on global climate
(IPCC)”.
9. In fact, the evidence suggests
no discernible human influence
on global climate whatsoever.
10. Satellites and weather balloons

perform more accurately in
measuring temperature as
compared to ground-based sta-
tions because they can do the
following.
102
Lee el siguiente párrafo y decide de qué tipo de causa o efecto tratan las cadenas causales.
Ejercicio 2. Subraya en el párrafo los efectos y encierra las causas.
Ejercicio 3. Redacta las razones de tu elección basándote en la información.
The Greenhouse Effect is at the heart of the debate of global warming. Major
greenhouse gases include water vapor, methane, and carbon dioxide. Figure 6 shows a simple model of
the greenhouse effect. The greenhouse effect model is based on the following:
1. Solar radiation passes through the clear atmosphere.

2. Some solar radiation is reflected by the earth and the atmosphere.
3. Most radiation is absorbed by the Earth’s surface, which in turn heats it.
4. Infra-red radiation is emitted from the Earth’s surface.
5. Some of the Infra-red radiation is absorbed and re-emitted by the greenhouse gases. The effect
of this is to warm both the surface and the lower atmosphere.
This greenhouse warming is actually beneficial as it makes Earth’s average temperature a warm +15°C,
rather than a chilly -18°C.
The main greenhouse absorbers of Infra-red radiation are water vapor and clouds, not CO2! According
to Macdonald et al if all of the greenhouse gases, except water vapor, were to suddenly disappear, “we
would still be left with a significant fraction of the current greenhouse effect.” Many scientists still feel,
however, that any increase in CO2 and other smaller greenhouse gases would still lead to a rise in global
temperatures! Therefore, to summarize the greenhouse effect in relation to global temperature one
could say, “Much of the observed temperature increase during the past century occurred before the rise
in greenhouse gases” according to Macdonald et al.
Ejercicio 4. Observa la siguiente imagen y contesta las preguntas.
103
Las relaciones que encontraste en el texto ¿son de tipo causa o de efecto?
____________________________________________________________________
¿Qué marcadores te permitieron hallar la respuesta?
____________________________________________________________________
¿Qué relación tiene el gráfico con la información que le precede?
____________________________________________________________________
Ejercicio 5. Lee el siguiente párrafo y contesta la pregunta.
¿Qué tipo de cadena causal se presenta a continuación?
The Presidents’ Initiative on Global Climate Change states that “ the scientific con-
sensus is clear that 1) greenhouse gases are rapidly building up in the atmosphere
as a result of human actions; 2) that these increased concentrations will change our
climate; and 3) that these changes could have serious adverse and disruptive conse-
quences”.
104
TEMA 21: SÍNTESIS I - RESUMEN
Objetivo: Al término de este tema serás capaz de hacer una síntesis de tipo escrito a partir de las oraciones
tópico, utilizando conectores de manera apropiada para dar coherencia al resumen.
Un resumen es una forma de síntesis elaborada a partir de la información de un texto. Su característica pri-
mordial es que respeta el orden que el autor dio al mismo. El resumen se redacta a partir de la información
contenida en un plan esquema (ver: Manual de Comprensión de Lectura 1) las ideas se unen utilizando aque-
llos conectores que mejor reflejen la información contenida en el texto y agregando solo aquellas palabras que
den coherencia a la redacción para que se comprenda mejor el resumen. En los resúmenes no se deben incluir
ejemplos, ni listados, sólo aquella información que nos ayude a recordar y reconstruir lo que leímos.
PLAN ESQUEMA
extraer
CONCEPTOS DEL
PÁRRAFO EN FORMA DE
PALABRAS CLAVE
redactar
ENUNCIADOS POR PÁRRA-

FO CON LOS CONCEPTOS
LOS ENUNCIADOS PARA ELABORAR OTRAS

FORMAS DE SÍNTESIS MÁS ELABORADAS
elaborar
(RESUMEN, CUADRO SINÓPTICO, MAPA
CONCEPTUAL)
105
Veamos un ejemplo de cómo se puede crear un resumen, para elaborarlo se utilizará el texto When man’s brain
began to get bigger
WHEN MAN’S BRAIN BEGAN TO GET BIGGER

By Roger Highfield, Science Editor
UK News- Electronic Telegraph
Thursday 8 May 1997- Issue 713
New evidence that it required a change in the female pelvis for the modern brain to
evolve has come from a study published today of brain evolution over the past two
million years.
Scientists have studied how brain size in modern and primitive humans has chan-
ged relative to body size, a rough measure of intelligence. In the journal Nature, Dr
Christopher Ruff of Johns Hopkins School of Medicine in Baltimore, Maryland, uses
two accurate measures of body mass, based on dimensions of the femur and pelvis.
The major increase in the ratio of brain-to-body size occurred between 600,000 and
150,000 years ago. Dr Ruff said: “It was not until the pelvis was restructured half a
million years ago that we could give birth to a larger headed newborn which then
sets the stage for a larger headed adult”.
RESUMEN:
When man’s brain began to get bigger
El cerebro humano evolucionó a partir de un cambio en la pelvis femenina lo que permitió el nacimiento de
bebes con cerebros más grandes. El aumento de tamaño del cerebro se dio hace 600,000 a 150,000 años.
Ejercicio 1. Elabora un plan esquema y un resumen del texto.
HOW CAN SOMEONE DIE FROM DRINKING TOO MUCH WATER?
Layton, Julia. 18 January 2007. HowStuffWorks.com.

<http://health.howstuffworks.com/water-intoxication.htm> 26 February 2009.
I. At its most basic, water intoxication occurs when a person drinks so much water
that the other nutrients in the body become diluted to the point that they can no
longer do their jobs. You’ve probably heard the term electrolyte before, whether
in reference to sports drinks (which provide electrolytes in addition to fluids) or to
certain conditions, such as bulimia or diarrea, that cause dangerous “electrolyte im-
balances” in the body. Electrolytes are simply salt ions (atoms with an overall positive
or negative charge) that cells use to move fluids and nerve messages into and out of
cells and throughout the body. Without electrolytes, the body can’t function. Water
intoxication causes an electrolyte imbalance that affects concentrations of the ion
106
sodium, and it leads to a condition called hyponatremia.
II. In cases of water intoxication, it is extreme hyponatremia that can ultimately cause
coma and death. If it’s caught early, treatment with IV fluids containing electrolytes
can lead to a complete recovery; but untreated, hyponatremia is fatal. Water intoxi-
cation is basically one form of hyponatremia -- the condition can also be caused by
excessive sweating, severe burns, prolonged dehydration and certain liver and kidney
problems, among other diseases and conditions.
III. When a person dies from hyponatremia as a result of water intoxication, the ini-
tiating factor is a severe sodium imbalance that causes massive cell damage. Sodium
is a positively charged ion, and its role in the body is to circulate the fluids outside of
cells. As a result, sodium helps regulate blood pressure and maintain the signals that
let muscles operate properly, among other things. Cells actively maintain a precise
sodium concentration in the body. Inside the cell, there are more electrolytes; out-
side the cell, there is more water. Cells keep sodium levels healthy by moving water
and electrolytes into and out of the cell to either dilute or increase sodium levels
in body fluids. But when someone drinks a tremendous amount of water in a short
period of time, and the water does not contain any added electrolytes, the cellular
maintenance system can’t handle the level of sodium dilution that occurs.
IV. The result is that cells desperately try to increase the sodium concentration in
body fluids by taking in tremendous amounts of water. Some cells can swell a great
deal; others cannot. Brain cells are constrained by the skull and can end up bursting
with the pressure of the water they are taking in.
V. The exact amount of water intake that can lead to water intoxication is unknown
and varies with each individual. Symptoms of water intoxication actually look a lot
like the symptoms of alcohol intoxication, including nausea, altered mental state, and
vomiting. Other symptoms include headaches, muscle weakness and convulsions. In
severe cases of water intoxication, coma and death come fairly quickly as a result of
brain swelling. The condition is quite rare in the general population, but in distance
athletics, it’s a known risk and is often avoided by drinking sports drinks instead of
water during training and events.
Plan esquema:
Párrafo 1
Párrafo 2
107
Párrafo 3
Párrafo 4
Párrafo 5
RESUMEN:
108
TEMA 22: SÍNTESIS II - CUADRO SINÓPTICO
Objetivo: Al término de este tema seras capaz de utilizar tus conocimientos de ordenamiento y clasificación
para organizar los temas y presentarlos de manera lineal con o sin un objetivo previo.
En esta clase revisaremos la elaboración de cuadros sinópticos. Vamos a utilizar el fragmento del texto Evolu-
ción del Cerebro Humano, que revisamos la lección pasada, para elaborar un cuadro sinóptico.
CUADRO SINÓPTICO
Cambio en pelvis femenina Bebes con cerebros más

Evolución grandes
del cerebro Hace 600,000 a 150,000 años
humano
Observa cuidadosamente el mapa conceptual sobre las formas de síntesis:

La elaboración de una síntesis es un tema que se ha tratado a lo largo del curso de lectura, en cada ocasión
agregando elementos o ampliando la información ya dada. En esta ocasión agregaremos una forma más de
síntesis, la elaboración de mapas conceptuales.
Observa el siguiente mapa conceptual.
SÍNTESIS
se presenta en forma de
ENUNCIATIVA se basa en ESQUEMÁTICA

(ESCRITA) (GRÁFICA)
IDEAS PRINCIPALES requiere de
sigue
por medio de SECUENCIA DEL ORDENAMIENTO
TEXTO
COHERENCIA
sigue JERARQUIZACIÓN
para obtener MAPA
CONCEPTUAL para obtener
RESUMEN CUADRO
tiene SINÓPTICO
DIRECCIONALIDAD Y según objetivo
CONEXIONES ENTRE EJE CENTRAL
CONCEPTOS ES EL TEMA
109
Ejercicio 1. Identifica las ideas principales.
SURVEY DEVELOPMENT AND THE ENVIRONMENT

21st March 1998
DIRT POOR
Environment Search archive
Poor countries have the world’s worst environmental problems. They cannot afford
to put up with them, argues Daniel Litvin.
I. “The centralization of population in great cities exercises of itself an unfavorable

influence,” wrote Friedrich Engels in 1844. “All putrefying vegetable and animal subs-
tances give off gases decidedly injurious to health, and if these gases have no free
way of escape, they inevitably poison the atmosphere… [The poor] are obliged to
throw all garbage, all dirty water, often all disgusting drainage and excrement into the
streets, being without other means of disposing of them; they are thus compelled to
infect the region of their own dwelling”.
II. Much of Engels’s writing seems irrelevant today, but his description of working-
class life in 19th-century London paints an uncannily accurate picture of slum life
in developing countries at the end of the 20th century. In the Klong Toey district of
Bangkok, the stench from the rotting rubbish and fetid water that collect between
the shacks is overpowering. In the north of Mexico city, near Santa Fe, hovels cling
to the sides of a steep valley which most days is choked with smog, and streams of
untreated sewage run down to the river below. In the Moroccan town of Marrakesh,
the smell of rotting cattle flesh surrounds tanneries for miles around.
III. Conventional wisdom has it** that concern for the environment is a luxury only
the rich world can afford; that only people whose basic needs for food and shelter
have been met (as well as, perhaps, some not-so-basic ones for things like cars and
televisions) can start worrying about the health of the planet. This survey will argue
that developing countries, too, should be thinking about the environment. True, in
the rich countries a strong environmental movement did not emerge until long after
they had become industrialized, a stage that many developing countries have yet to
reach. And true, many of the developed world’s environmental concerns have litt-
le to do with immediate threats to its inhabitants’ well-being. People worry about
whether carbon-dioxide emissions might lead to a warmer climate next century, or
whether genetically engineered crops might have unforeseen consequences for the
ecosystem. That is why, when rich-world environmentalists campaign against pollu-
tion in poor countries, they are often accused of naivety. Such countries, the critics
say, have more pressing concerns, such as getting their people out of poverty.
IV. But the environmental problems that developing countries should

worry about are different from those that western pundits have fashionable argu-
ments over. They are not about potential problems in the next century, but about
**has it — ésta es una expresión idiomática que utiliza un sustituto, la palabra “it” para referirse a la idea siguiente: “concern for the environment is a
luxery only the rich world can afford”. La expresión significa: “se acepta enteramente” la idea que sigue a la expresión.
110
indisputable harm being caused today by, above all, contaminated water and pollu-
ted air. The survey will argue that, contrary to conventional wisdom, solving such pro-
blems need not hurt economic growth; indeed dealing with them now will generally
be cheaper than leaving them to cause further harm.

V. In most developing countries pollution seems to be getting worse, not better. Most
big cities in Latin America, for example, are suffering rising levels of air pollution.
Populations in poor countries are growing so fast that improvements in water supply
have failed to keep up with the number of extra people. Worldwide, about a billion
people still have no access to clean water, and water contaminated by sewage is
estimated to kill some 2 m children every year. Throughout Latin America, Asia and
Africa, forests are disappearing, causing not just long-term concern about climate
change but also immediate economic damage. Forest fires in Indonesia last year pro-
duced a huge blanket of smog that enveloped much of South-East Asia and kept the
tourists away. It could happen again, and probably will.

VI. Recent research suggests that pollution in developing countries is far more than
a minor irritation: it imposes a heavy economic cost. A World Bank study last year
put the cost of air and water pollution in China at $54 billion a year, equivalent to an
astonishing 8% of the country’s GDP. Another study estimated the health costs of air
pollution in Jakarta and Bangkok in the early 1990´s at around 10% of these citie´s
income. These are no more than educated guesses, but whichever way the sums are
done, the cost is not negligible.

VII. The growth in environmental problems in developing countries has been mat-
ched by a rise in local anxiety about them. In recent years hundreds of environmental
lobby groups have sprung up in Latin America and Asia. Some of these are offshoots
of rich-world groups such as Greenpeace, which now has offices in 11 developing
countries. But many of the new groups are home-grown, drawing support from peo-
ple increasingly worried about the effect of pollution on their health.

VIII. In Bolivia, Mexico and Brazil, green activists have recently entered government.
Bangkok’s people, frustrated by the city’s notorious congestion and pollution, have
elected a governor with strong green credentials, Bichit Ratanakorn, who has threa-
tened to “name and shame” firms that flout
pollution rules. He is urging other Asian cities
at an earlier stage of industrialization “not [to]
follow in our footsteps”.

IX. From Brazil to China, governments are
passing increasingly tough environmental re-
gulations, many of them modeled on green
standards in Europe and North America. Of-
ten this is an empty gesture: many countries
are unwilling or unable to enforce green re-
gulations. Brazilian politicians may have felt
a warm glow in January when they passed a
law against” environmental crimes, but Brazil
111
already has legislation prohibiting Amazon landowners from deforesting more than
20% of their land. That has done nothing to stop many of them cutting down all their
trees.

X. There are environmental lessons to be learnt from the rich countries, but these
do not involve blindly copying everything they do. In most of the OECD countries,
emissions of lead, carbon monoxide and sulphur dioxide have been falling steadily
since 1980. Investment in waste water treatment has helped to clean up rivers and
lakes. Even forest cover has increased a little over the past few decades. But a simi-
lar effect might have been achieved at lower cost. In most rich countries, spending
on pollution control amounts to around 1-2% of GDP. Governments and regulators
have often forced particular technologies on firms rather than allowing them to find
the cheapest way to reduce their emissions. Many emissions standards have been
imposed at a late stage of industrial development, when firms had already invested
heavily in processes that caused pollution. Air and water standards are still being
tightened up, and at ever greater cost: Europe’s water utilities, for example, estimate
they will need to invest around 140 billion ecus ($152 billion) by 2005 to comply with
EU regulations on sewage treatment. Many would argue that the tiny health benefits
do not justify this expenditure even in the rich EU countries, and nobody seriously
suggests that the developing countries should aim this high.

XI. But most developing countries are nowhere near the point of diminishing returns
from investment in pollution controls. Another recent World Bank study found that
across a range of Asian countries, including Thailand, Indonesia and China, the cost
of a simple set of environmental measures—such as phasing out lead in petrol and
investing in clean water supplies—would be much lower than the value of the bene-
fits to human health.
Driving forces
XII. If the problems can be fixed so cheaply, why are governments so slow to get on
with it? Start by considering the three trends most widely blamed for causing envi-
ronmental problems—population growth, urbanization and industrialization.

XIII. The world’s population is increasing by around 85 millions, every year—the equi-
valent of, say, another Mexico. The pace of growth has come down a little since the
1960´s, but according to United Nations projections it remains fast enough to push
the world’s population above 9 billion by 2050, from around 6 billion today. Most of
that growth will be in developing countries. The population explosion of the past few
decades has been due to a happy trend: a dramatic rise in life expectancy, thanks in
part to the spread of modern medicines and better sanitation. But, say environmen-
talists, the world’s supply of natural resources is finite, and income regions particular
resources are already scarce (water in the Middle East, certain species of fish in the
North Atlantic). How can these resources be made to go round an extra 3 billion
people?

XIV. Increasing urbanization is another environmental worry. The historic movement
from country to town in rich countries is now being echoed in poor countries, but
112
on a much bigger scale (see chart). The UN expects that between 1990 and 2025 the
number of people living in urban areas will double to more than 5 billion, and that
90% of that growth will be in developing countries. In Africa and Asia more than half
the population still lives in the countryside, compared with only a fifth in Europe and
North America.

XV. Country-dwellers in developing countries are moving to cities for the same sorts
of reasons as in the rich countries in the 19th century: they are pushed by a scarcity
of farm jobs, and they are pulled by the hope of better jobs and a better life. Go-
vernments in many developing countries have accelerated this process by pursuing
economic policies that discriminate against agriculture: until recently, for example,
many governments kept food prices artificially low. The reason why urbanization is
likely to harm the local environment is simply that people are much more densely
crowded together.

XVI. Burn a tire in the countryside, and no one may worry about it; but in the city
it will cause a great many coughs and splutters. Industrialization, too, is an obvious
cause of environmental problems. Today’s rich countries moved first from agriculture
to manufacturing industries which use resources intensively, and later to services
and less polluting types of manufacturing. Many developing countries are now un-
dergoing that first transition at the same time as succumbing to a temptation not
available in the 19th century: motor vehicles.

XVII. In rich countries, there are typically around 40 cars per 100 people; in Latin
America the figure is about seven, in China two. But the developing countries are cat-
ching up: the number of vehicles registered in China has been growing by 12-14% a
year for the past 20 years. The smog now hanging above many cities in Latin America
and Asia is a complex cocktail of pollutants that include car exhaust fumes as well as
emissions from coal burning and smoke from factories.

XVIII. Industrialization, urbanization and population growth all help to explain the
developing world’s growing environmental problems, but they are not the only rea-
sons. Poverty itself makes things worse and the biggest culprit of all is the failure of
governments and institutions to pursue sensible policies.
Ejercicio 2. Elabora el cuadro sinóptico correspondiente.
113
TEMA 23: SÍNTESIS III - MAPA CONCEPTUAL
Objetivo: Al término de este tema serás capaz de utilizar tus conocimientos de clasificación y jerarquización
para organizar la información a partir de los conceptos presentados en el texto y relacionarlos en forma de
red.
En la clase anterior trabajaste un cuadro sinóptico del texto Dirt Poor, aquí discutiremos las diferencias que
existen entre un cuadro sinóptico y una mapa conceptual.
CUADRO SINÓPTICO MAPA CONCEPTUAL
»» Se basa en ideas principales

»» Tienen formato gráfico.
»» Requieren jerarquización de la información.
»» Transforma los conceptos en ideas generalizadas (expresadas con el
mínimo posible de términos)
»» Presenta la información de lo más general a lo específico, siendo
el concepto más amplio el eje de la síntesis.
Puede abarcar la totalidad Abarca la totalidad de la informa-

del texto, ser cronológico o ción del texto.
temático.
Puede seguir el orden del Los conceptos se presentan den-

texto o no. tro de formas geométricas.
Sigue una línea horizontal por Se presenta de forma vertical.

concepto hasta agotarlo.
Los conceptos se relacionan

con flechas, sin seguir un orden
Puede ser horizontal (las formas de relación
horizontal o vertical. se marcan por el sentido de las
flechas).
Las flechas de relación están mar-

cadas por términos que indican
de que tipo de relación se trata.
114
Ejercicio 1. Elabora el mapa conceptual correspondiente.
Al final del texto encontrarás el mapa conceptual de “Dirty poor”, puedes consultarlo para la elaboración de
tu mapa.
SPECIAL FEATURES
Plenty of gloom
20th December 1997
Forecasters of scarcity and doom are not only
invariably wrong, they think that being wrong
proves them right.
I. In 1798 Thomas Robert Malthus inaugurated

a grand tradition of environmentalism with his
best-selling pamphlet on population. Malthus
argued with impeccable logic but distinctly pec-
cable premises that since population tended to
increase geometrically (1,2,4,8 . . . ) and food
supply to increase arithmetically (1,2,3,4 . . . ),
the starvation of Great Britain was inevitable
and imminent. Almost everybody thought he
was right. He was wrong.

II. In 1865 an influential book by Stanley Jevons
argued with equally good logic and equally
flawed premises that Britain would run out of coal in a few short years time. In 1914,
the United States Bureau of Mines predicted that American oil reserves would last
ten years. In 1939 and again in 1951, the Department of the Interior said American
oil would last 13 years. Wrong, wrong, wrong and wrong.

III. This article argues that predictions of ecological doom, including recent ones,
have such a terrible track record that people should take them with pinches of salt
instead of lapping them up with relish. For reasons of their own, pressure groups,
journalists and fame-seekers will no doubt continue to peddle ecological catastro-
phes at an undiminishing speed. These people, oddly, appear to think that having
been invariably wrong in the past, makes them more likely to be right in the future.
The rest of us might do better to recall, when warned of the next doomsday, what
ever became of the last one.
Empty imaginations

IV. In 1972 the Club of Rome published a highly influential report called “Limits to
Growth”. To many in the environmental movement, that report still stands as a
beacon of sense in the foolish world of economics. But were its predictions borne
out?

V. “Limits to Growth” said total global oil reserves amounted to 550 billion barrels.
115
“We could use up all of the proven reserves of oil in the entire world by the end of the
next decade,” said President Jimmy Carter shortly afterwards. Sure enough, between
1970 and 1990 the world used 600 billion barrels of oil. So, according to the Club of
Rome, reserves should have been overdrawn by 50 billion barrels by 1990. In fact,
by 1990 unexploited reserves amounted to 900 billion barrels—not counting the tar
shales, of which a single deposit in Alberta contains more than 550 billion barrels.

VI. The Club of Rome made similarly wrong predictions about natural gas, silver, tin,
uranium, aluminum, copper, lead and zinc. In every case, it said finite reserves of
these minerals were approaching exhaustion and prices would rise steeply. In every
case except tin, known reserves have actually grown since the Club’s report; in some
cases they have quadrupled. “Limits to Growth” simply misunderstood the meaning
of the word “reserves”.

VII. The Club of Rome’s mistakes have not tarnished its confidence. It more recently
issued to wide acclaim “Beyond the Limits”, a book that essentially said: although we
were too pessimistic about the future before, we remain equally pessimistic about
the future today. But environmentalists have been a little more circumspect since
1990 about predicting the exhaustion of minerals. That year, a much-feted environ-
mentalist called Paul Ehrlich, whose words will prove an inexhaustible (though not
infinite: there is a difference) reserve of misprediction for this article, sent an econo-
mist called Julian Simon a check for $570.07 in settlement of a wager.
VIII. Dr Ehrlich would later claim that he was “goaded into making a bet with Simon
on a matter of marginal environmental importance.” At the time, though, he said
he was keen to “accept Simon’s astonishing offer before other greedy people jump
in.” Dr Ehrlich chose five minerals: tungsten,
nickel, copper, chrome and tin. They agreed
how much of these metals $1,000 would buy
in 1980, then ten years later recalculated
how much that amount of metal would cost
(still in 1980 dollars) and Dr Ehrlich agreed to
pay the difference if the price fell, Dr Simon if
the price rose. Dr Simon won easily; indeed,
he would have won even if they had not ad-
justed the prices for inflation, and he would
have won if Dr Ehrlich had chosen virtually
any mineral: of 35 minerals, 33 fell in price
during the 1980s. Only manganese and zinc
were exceptions.
IX. Dr Simon frequently offers to repeat the
bet with any prominent doomsayer, but has
not yet found a taker.

X. Others have yet to cotton on. The 1983 edition of a British GCSE school textbook
said zinc reserves would last ten years and natural gas 30 years. By 1993, the author
had wisely removed references to zinc (rather than explain why it had not run out),
and he gave natural gas 50 years, which mocked his forecast of ten years earlier. But
116
still not a word about price, the misleading nature of quoted “reserves” or substitu-
tability.
XI. So much for minerals. The record of mispredicted food supplies is even worse.
Consider two quotations from Paul Ehrlich’s best-selling books in the 1970s.

XII. Agricultural experts state that a tripling of the food supply of the world will be ne-
cessary in the next 30 years or so, if the 6 or 7 billion people who may be alive in the
year 2000 are to be adequately fed. Theoretically such an increase might be possible,
but it is becoming increasingly clear that it is totally impossible in practice.

XIII. The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s the world will undergo fami-
nes—hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death.
XIV. He was not alone. Lester Brown of the Worldwatch Institute began predicting in
1973 that population would soon outstrip food production, and he still does so every
time there is a temporary increase in wheat prices. In 1994, after 21 years of being
wrong, he said: “After 40 years of record food production gains, output per person
has reversed with unanticipated abruptness.” Two bumper harvests followed and the
price of wheat fell to record lows. Yet Mr. Brown’s pessimism remains as impregnable
to facts as his views are popular with newspapers.

XV. The facts on world food production are truly startling for those who have heard
only the doomsayers’ views. Since 1961, the population of the world has almost dou-
bled, but food production has more than doubled. As a result, food production per
head has risen by 20% since 1961 (see chart 2). Nor is this improvement confined
to rich countries. According to the Food and Agriculture Organization, calories con-
sumed per capita per day are 27% higher in the third world than they were in 1963.
Deaths from famine, starvation and malnutrition are fewer than ever before.
117
XVI. “Global 2000” was a report to the president of the United States written in 1980
by a committee of the great and the good. It was so influential that it caused one CNN
producer to “switch from being an objective journalist to an advocate” of environ-
mental doom. “Global 2000” predicted that population would increase faster than
world food production, so that food prices would rise by between 35% and 115% by
2000. So far the world food commodity index has fallen by 50% (see chart 3). With
two years to go, prices may yet quintuple to prove “Global 2000” right. Want to bet?

XVII. Perhaps the reader thinks the tone of this article a little unforgiving. These pre-
dictions may have been spectacularly wrong, but they were well-meant. But in that
case, those quoted would readily admit their error, which they do not. It was not im-
possible to be right at the time. There were people who in 1970 predicted abundant
food, who in 1975 predicted cheap oil, who in 1980 predicted cheaper and more
abundant minerals. Today those people—among them Norman Macrae of this news-
paper, Julian Simon, Aaron Wildavsky—are ignored by the press and vilified by the
environmental movement. For being right, they are called “right-wing”. The truth can
be a bitter medicine to swallow.
Hot headed

XVIII. Meanwhile, environmental attention switched from resources to pollution.
Cancer-causing chemicals were suddenly said to be everywhere: in water, in food,
in packaging. Last summer Edward Goldsmith blamed the death of his brother, Sir
James, on chemicals: all cancer is caused by chemicals, he claimed, and cancer rates
are rising. Not so. The rate of mortality from cancers not related to smoking for those
between 35 and 69 is actually falling steadily—by 15% since 1950. Organically grown
broccoli and coffee are full of natural substances that are just as carcinogenic as man-
made chemicals at high doses and just as safe at low doses.
XIX. In the early 1980s acid rain became the favorite cause of doom. Lurid reports ap-
peared of widespread forest decline in Germany, where half the trees were said to be
in trouble. By 1986, the United Nations reported that 23% of all trees in Europe were
moderately or severely damaged by acid rain. What happened? They recovered. The
biomass stock of European forests actually increased during the 1980s. The damage
all but disappeared. Forests did not decline: they thrived.
XX. A similar gap between perception and reality occurred in the United States.
Greens fell over each other to declare the forests of North America acidified and
dying. “There is no evidence of a general or unusual decline of forests in the United
States or Canada due to acid rain,” concluded a ten-year, $700m official study. When
asked if he had been pressured to be optimistic, one of the authors said the reverse
was true. “Yes, there were political pressures . . . Acid rain had to be an environmen-
tal catastrophe, no matter what the facts revealed.”

XXI. Today the mother of all environmental scares is global warming. Here the jury is
still out, though not according to President Clinton. But before you rush to join the
consensus he has declared, compare two quotations. The first comes from Newsweek
in 1975: “Meteorologists disagree about the cause and extent of the cooling trend .
118
. . But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend will reduce agricultural
productivity for the rest of the century.” The second comes from Vice-President Al
Gore in 1992: “Scientists concluded—almost unanimously—that global warming is
real and the time to act is now.” (The italics are ours.)

XXII. There are ample other causes for alarmism for the dedicated pessimist as the
century’s end nears. The extinction of elephants, the threat of mad-cow disease, out-
breaks of the Ebola virus, and chemicals that mimic sex hormones are all fashionable.
These come in a different category from the scares cited above. The trend in each is
undoubtedly not benign, but it is exaggerated.

XXIII. In 1984 the United Nations asserted that the desert was swallowing 21m hecta-
res of land every year. That claim has been comprehensively demolished. There has
been and is no net advance of the desert at all. In 1992 Mr Gore asserted that 20%
of the Amazon had been deforested and that deforestation continued at the rate of
80m hectares a year. The true figures are now agreed to be 9% and 21m hectares a
year gross at its peak in the 1980s, falling to about 10m hectares a year now.
XXIV. Just one environmental scare in the past 30 years bears out the most alarmist
predictions made at the time: the effect of DDT (a pesticide) on birds of prey, otters
and some other predatory animals. Every other environmental scare has been either
wrong or badly exaggerated. Will you believe the next one? Environmental scare sto-
ries now follow such a predictable line that we can chart their course. Year 1 is the
year of the scientist, who discovers some potential threat. Year 2 is the year of the
journalist, who oversimplifies and exaggerates it. Only now, in year 3, do the environ-
mentalists join the bandwagon (almost no green scare has been started by greens).
They polarize the issue. Either you agree that the world is about to come to an end
and are fired by righteous indignation, or you are a paid lackey of big business.

XXV. Year 4 is the year of the bureaucrat. A conference is mooted, keeping public
officials well supplied with club-class tickets and limelight. This diverts the argument
from science to regulation. A totemic “target” is the key feature: 30% reductions in
sulphur emissions; stabilization of greenhouse gases at 1990 levels; 140,000 ritually
slaughtered healthy British cows.

XXVI. Year 5 is the time to pick a villain and gang up on him. It is usually America
(global warming) or Britain (acid rain), but Russia (CFCs and ozone) or Brazil (defores-
tation) have had their day. Year 6 is the time for the skeptic who says the scare is exa-
ggerated. This drives greens into paroxysms of pious rage. “How dare you give space
to fringe views?” cry these once-fringe people to newspaper editors. But by now the
scientist who first gave the warning is often embarrassingly to be found among the
skeptics. Roger Revelle, nickname “Dr Greenhouse”, who fired Al Gore with global
warming evangelism, wrote just before his death in 1991: “The scientific basis for
greenhouse warming is too uncertain to justify drastic action at this time.”

XXVII. Year 7 is the year of the quiet climbdown. Without fanfare, the official consen-
sus estimate of the size of the problem is shrunk. Thus, when nobody was looking,
the population “explosion” became an asymptotic rise to a maximum of just 15 bi-
119
llion; this was then downgraded to 12 billion, then less than 10 billion. That means
population will never double again. Greenhouse warming was originally going to be
“uncontrolled”. Then it was going to be 2.5-4 degrees in a century. Then it became
1.5-3 degrees (according to the United Nations). In two years, elephants went from
imminent danger of extinction to badly in need of contraception (the facts did not
change, the reporting did).
Doom kills
XXVIII. Is it not a good thing to exaggerate the potential ecological problems the
world faces rather than underplay them? Not necessarily. A new book edited by
Melissa Leach and Robin Mearns at the University of Sussex (“The Lie of the Land”,
published by James Currey/Heinemann) documents just how damaging the myth of
deforestation and population pressure has been in parts of the Sahel. Westerners
have forced inappropriate measures on puzzled local inhabitants in order to meet ac-
tivists’ preconceived notions of environmental change. The myth that oil and gas will
imminently run out, together with worries about the greenhouse effect, is responsi-
ble for the despoliation of wild landscapes in Wales and Denmark by ugly, subsidized
and therefore ultimately job-destroying wind farms. School textbooks are counsels
of despair and guilt (see “Environmental Education”, published by the Institute of
Economic Affairs), which offer no hope of winning the war against famine, disease
and pollution, thereby inducing fatalism rather than determination.

XXIX. Above all, the exaggeration of the population explosion leads to a form of mi-
santhropy that comes dangerously close to fascism. The aforementioned Dr Ehrlich is
an unashamed believer in the need for coerced family planning. His fellow eco-guru,
Garrett Hardin, has said that “freedom to breed is intolerable”. If you think popula-
tion is “out of control” you might be tempted to agree to such drastic curtailments of
liberty. But if you know that the graph is flattening, you might take a more tolerant
view of your fellow human beings.

XXX. You can be in favor of the environment without being a pessimist. There ought
to be room in the environmental movement for those who think that technology
and economic freedom will make the world cleaner and will also take the pressure
off endangered species. But at the moment such optimists are distinctly unwelcome
among environmentalists. Dr Ehrlich likes to call economic growth the creed of the
cancer cell. He is not alone. Sir Crispin Tickell calls economics “not so much dismal as
half-witted”.

XXXI. Environmentalists are quick to accuse their opponents in business of having
vested interests. But their own incomes, their advancement, their fame and their
very existence can depend on supporting the most alarming versions of every envi-
ronmental scare. “The whole aim of practical politics”, said H.L. Mencken, “is to keep
the populace alarmed—and hence clamorous to be led to safety—by menacing it
with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” Mencken’s forecast, at
least, appears to have been correct.
120
No hay
infraestructura Contaminación del
para disponer de la hábitat.
basura.
Se podrían
Emisiones de gases Plomo, CO,
eliminar a bajo
tóxicos. Dióxido de sulfuro.
costo.
Carencia de agua. Carencia líquido. Tratamiento caro.

Degradación del
Contaminación por
medio ambiente.
tóxicos.
Desaparición de
Incendios.
bosques
Deforestación.
y selvas.
Carencia de
Desaparición de alimentos.
flora y fauna. Alteración del
Problemas medio.
ambientales
en países pobres
Crecimiento Aumento de nacimientos. Hacinamiento, falta de

poblacional. Aumento de lapso de vida. servicios, falta de vivienda.
Requerimientos
Hacinamiento.
Urbanización. Migración hacia las económicos.
Abandono del
ciudades. Falta de empleo en el
campo.
campo.
Mejora económica del país. Utilización de Altos costos y

Industrialización. deterioro
Poco interés en el campo. tecnología sucia.
ambiental.
Exigen medidas para

Países ricos. remediar deterioro,
Grupos ambientalistas. adopción de tecnología
limpia.
121
TEMA 24: TIPOS DE TEXTO
Objetivo: Al término de este tema serás capaz de reconocer la tipología de un texto a partir de sus
características para utilizar las estrategias adecuadas para su comprensión.
Por su constitución, podemos decir que existen cuatro tipos de textos que son:
»» Expositivo
»» Narrativo
»» Descriptivo
»» Argumentativo
Esto es cierto sólo en teoría, ya que la mayoría de los textos son una combinación de estos cuatro tipos. Uno de
éstos predomina sobre los otros, lo que permite su clasificación dentro de la clasificación mencionada.
Por supuesto, cada uno de estos tipos tiene sus características principales.
Los textos expositivos; tienen la característica de desarrollar un tema o parte de él en forma completa y expli-
cativa. No utilizan tiempos verbales definidos, ya que pueden explicar algo que ya sucedió, que sucede o que
sucederá. Es común que estos textos presenten definiciones y explicaciones claras que muestren el punto que
el autor quiere transmitir. Comúnmente, las ideas tienen una línea definida que representan la experiencia o
fruto del trabajo del autor, que desea hacer esta información del dominio público.
Estos textos abundan en publicaciones científicas, de investigación o académicas, pero también suele encon-
trárseles en textos de género periodístico cuyo fin es difundir información, comúnmente factual.
El texto narrativo, al igual que el primer tipo de texto se encuentra comúnmente en periódicos, revistas y libros
académicos. Su característica principal es la de presentar una secuencia lógica de sucesos que tiende a detallar
los hechos acontecidos. Por este motivo su estructura se apoya fuertemente en los tiempos verbales, puede
estar escrito en cualquier tiempo verbal, dependiendo si lo que se narra ya sucedió, está en proceso o va a su-
ceder. También se encuentran conectores de tiempo, como entonces, en aquel momento, después, luego, más
tarde, etc. Los textos narrativos no necesariamente presentan la información en un orden horizontal, dando
la información de principio a fin. Algunos autores presentan los sucesos en un orden arbitrario, sobre todo en
textos literarios; pero en textos académicos es usual conservar el orden lógico.
El texto descriptivo, tiene gran predominio de descriptores; son estas palabras las que guían nuestro punto
focal. La descripción también se puede encontrar en cualquier tiempo verbal, pues se puede describir con de-
talle algo que ya sucedió, que está sucediendo o que podría acontecer. La descripción puede ser de un objeto,
lugar o situación.
El texto argumentativo, es el más complejo de los tres. Esto se debe a que estos textos muestran al menos dos
facetas de un mismo tema; por ello, están basados en contrastes que son marcados con el uso sistemático de
conectores de todo tipo, especialmente de contraste, de propósito, de causa y efecto y de énfasis. En este tipo
de textos el autor tiene la opción de tomar una posición o de simplemente describir varias facetas de un mismo
tema, y dejar que el lector elija una posición.
Los textos argumentativos son comunes en ensayos, páginas editoriales, análisis en revistas de carácter finan-
ciero, económico, político, social, etc.
122
Analiza el siguiente mapa en relación con los tipos de texto.
TIPOS DE TEXTO
EXPOSITIVO NARRATIVO DESCRIPTIVO ARGUMENTATIVO
explica
ampliamente presenta detalla presenta
DEFINICIÓN
SECUENCIA OBJETOS DOS O MÁS
EXPERIENCIA
LÓGICA DE LUGARES PUNTOS DE
INVESTIGACIÓN
SUCESOS SITUACIONES VISTA
INFORMACIÓN
FACTUAL TIEMPOS PREDOMINIO PREDOMINIO
VERBALES DE DE
DESCRIPTORES CONECTORES
Ejercicio 1. Decide a que tipo pertenece cada texto.
Ejercicio 2. Elige un texto y elabora el cuadro sinóptico correspondiente.
Tipo de texto ____________________________________
LIFE BEYOND EARTH

(Excerpts from the January 2000 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC)
By Joel Achenbach
As scientists struggle to find a trace of life somewhere else in the universe, there
exists for many people a more dramatic situation, one in which extraterrestrial life
123
isn’t microbial and slimy but rather intelligent, technological, and lurking in our midst.
The believers in these aliens are not likely to be convinced that ETs are a bogus phe-
nomenon. An ability to elude detection and confirmation, particularly by mainstream
thinkers, is a presumed characteristic of the Visitors.

Having dropped in on a couple of UFO conventions and visited Roswell, New Mexico,
and its UFO museum, I’ve come to the conclusion that it’s not possible to win an
argument about space aliens. True believers and skeptics rarely go over to the other
side. I think it’s fair to say, however, that flying-saucer aliens lack scientific stature. If
they insist on being so jumpy, if they insist on abducting people in the middle of the
night when no one else can verify their presence, then they have no right to enter a
reputable natural history museum.

Many scientists don’t wonder why aliens are buzzing the Earth in flying saucers—
they wonder why they aren’t. In 1950 Enrico Fermi, a physicist, asked some of his co-
lleagues a question that would become famous: Where is everybody? Humans could
theoretically colonize the galaxy in a million years or so, and if they could, astronauts
from older civilizations could do the same. So why haven’t they come to Earth? This
is known as the Fermi paradox.
Could it be that they’re observing us but not interfering? (The zoo hypothesis.) Did
they come and leave artifacts and get bored and go away? (This is the “ancient as-
tronauts” idea that posits the aliens as builders of pyramids and so forth.) Or could
it be that for all intelligent species, interstellar travel is too expensive and time-con-
suming? (It’s just less than 25 trillion miles [40 trillion kilometers] from Earth to the
nearest star beyond the sun.)
Or could it be possible that, at least in our part of the galaxy, the most technologically
advanced species is the one right here on Earth?
***
Every three years a bioastronomy meeting gathers many of the leading thinkers in
the field. I went to the 1999 assemblage in August on the Big Island of Hawaii, and at
the opening reception around a hotel pool a University of Toronto sociologist named
Allen Tough offered a provocative theory:
“I think a probe is already here. It’s probably been here a long time.”
He didn’t mean flying saucers. His alien probes would be much smaller—“nanoprobes,”
tiny robotic exploratory craft sent to Earth from advanced civilizations. The alien pro-
bes may, at some point, let themselves be known to human civilization. How? Whe-
re? “I think it will happen on the World Wide Web,” said Tough.
Tough and about a dozen other visionaries had a pre-conference meeting to discuss
what to do if human civilization receives a “high-content” message from extrate-
rrestrials. There was much uncertainty about how well prepared humankind is for
such an event. We might have trouble crafting a response. Should we be forthcoming
about the flaws of our species? If we acknowledge our history of wars and slavery,
could that be misinterpreted as a threat? What if, even as an international committee
of well-meaning thinkers tried to put together a message, some guerrilla radio broad-
caster or “shock jock” beat everyone to it?
124
Bioastronomy also has its more down-to-Earth side. The meeting reminded me how
much there is still to learn about our own little solar system. Exobiologist Jack Far-
mer made a simple yet stunning point one morning when he noted that neither the
Viking landers in 1976 nor the Pathfinder spacecraft in 1997 carried to Mars the tool
so vital to a geologist: a magnifying lens. Nor would the polar lander scheduled for
a December 1999 landing carry such an instrument. Farmer’s comment remained in
my mind when Cindy Lee Van Dover, an oceanographer, noted that no one has ever
made a dive in a deep-sea submersible to an active hot vent in the Indian Ocean to
see what might be alive down there.

So before we worry about our dealings with the Galactic Empire, we have some se-
rious fieldwork to do closer to home.
Freeman Dyson, a physicist, has argued that humans may engineer new forms of
life that will be adapted to living in the vacuum of space or on the surface of frozen
moons and comets and asteroids. In Dyson’s universe, life is mobile, and planets are
gravitational traps inhibiting free movement.
“Perhaps our destiny is to be the midwives, to help the living universe to be born,” he
said recently. “Once life escapes from this little planet, there’ll be no stopping it.”

But life must first survive this planet. Humans in their modern anatomy have been
around only 125,000 years or so. It is not clear yet that a brain like ours is necessarily
a long-term advantage. We make mistakes. We build bombs. We ravage our world,
poison its water, foul its air. Our first order of business, as a species, is to [survive].

Tipo de texto ____________________________________
UK News Electronic Telegraph Thursday August 8 1996 Issue 445
SCIENTISTS STIR THE PRIMEVAL CHEMICAL SOUP

by Roger Highfield, Science Editor
METEORITE REVEALS 4 BILLION-YEAR-OLD SECRET FROM MARS
Chemists and computer scientists have made impressive progress in the effort to
find out what happened on Earth more than three billion years ago, when stirrings
in a primeval pool crossed the divide between a chemical reaction and the kind that
occurs in living things.
Today, in the journal Nature, Dr Reza Ghadiri, of the Scripps Research Institute, Ca-
lifornia, and colleagues show that little protein chunks, called peptides, thought to
be present on the primitive Earth, were capable of making copies of themselves - a
fundamental property of living things. Work by Prof Julius Rebek’s group, lso now ba-
sed at the Scripps, has created synthetic chemical reactions with certain features of
living things. Just as biological life ultimately emerges from the complex interactions
of inanimate microscopic units called molecules, so some believe that artificial life
may emerge from complex logical interactions within a computer.
Another such experiment, described earlier this year in the journal Physica D by
125
Andrew Pargellis at Bell Laboratories in New Jersey, showed how replicating pro-
grams–in effect artificial life forms– spontaneously evolve within a primordial soup
of computer code.
In 1953, Stanley Miller, then a student at the University of Chicago, created a pri-
meval world using two connected flasks: one containing an “ocean” of water, the
other a stew of simple substances thought at that time to be similar to the primeval
atmosphere.
When Miller passed a bolt of simulated lightning through the atmosphere, he found
that after a few days the water contained certain amino acids, the basic building
blocks of proteins essential to life on earth. Since then, a large body of evidence has
been accumulated showing that a range of biologically important molecules can be
made in a similar way. Others can be created with the help of light. Astronomers
have shown that any missing ones could have arrived on meteorites.
Tipo de texto
____________________________________
LIFE BEYOND EARTH II

(Excerpts from the January 2000 NATIONAL GEOGRAPHIC)
By Joel Achenbach
Exobiologists go to the worst places on Earth, or at least the most extreme—the

driest, coldest, most Mars-like or Europa-like environments they can find.
The place to find Penny Boston is in the nastiest cave imaginable. I tagged along with
Boston on one of her trips to a wet, bat-ridden cave in southern Mexico called Villa
Luz. Boston has been studying the microbes that thrive there—in environments whe-
re a human being not wearing a gas mask would perish.
“All my life I’ve wanted to cross the cosmos, go to other planets,” says Boston. “This
is probably as close as I’ll get at my age.”
The cave floor was covered with water of varying depths and no transparency, and
we walked gingerly so as to avoid discovering unmapped deep water. By caving stan-
dards, though, this was a walk in the park—no ropes required, just some crawling
and scrambling through low-ceilinged passages.
Eventually we reached the deepest, largest chamber, known as the Great Hall. Mid-
ges flitted, spiders spun webs, bats zagged and zigged just over our heads, emitting
their high-pitched sonar. Red rock walls were covered with green slime, black muck,
gooey white gypsum paste, and limestone in the process of being dissolved by sul-
furic acid.
Just as I was thinking how much this cave resembled the human nasal cavity, we
came to the snottites (Boston is lobbying to have the word recognized as a scientific
term). Snottites are gelatinous structures formed by microbial wastes. They dangle
from the ceiling. Boston and her team have been measuring their growth, trying to
understand the metabolism of the microbes and their long-term effect on the geolo-
126
gy of the cave. Dry weather since her last visit seemed to have inhibited the growth
of the structures.
Mike Spilde, another member of the team, splashed over to where I’d been inspec-
ting a water bug whose shell was covered with eggs. He reached into a spring bur-
bling from under a rock and pulled out some gray wads the consistency of cooked
cabbage. These are known, in keeping with the theme of the place, as phlegm balls.
They are vibrant microbial communities, not clinging to life in a narrow niche but
proliferating in it, replicating up a storm.
Taking a break back on the surface, Boston placed some of her cave work in context.
“We have discovered”—she means scientists in general—“organisms thriving in en-
vironments harsh to us but essential to them. It broadens your perspective. We all
suffer to some extent from ‘expertitis’ in science. It’s good for your soul, and good
for your intellect, and good for your work to have your imagination stretched, to be
open to the possibilities.”
Tipo de texto
____________________________________
127
TEMA 25: TEXTO DEDUCTIVO
Objetivo: Al término de este tema serás capaz de reconocer y comprender la secuencia lógica de un texto
que presenta la temática al inicio para desarrollarla a lo largo del texto, utilizando las estrategias adecuadas
para su comprensión.

Los autores de textos expresan sus ideas a través de un estilo propio; dentro de este estilo podemos conside-
rar aspectos como el tipo de texto, el formato que utiliza, la elección de vocabulario, entre otros aspectos. La
forma en que se forjan las ideas también está presente en el estilo.
Una persona puede preferir la lectura de textos inductivos o deductivos, porque esa es la forma en que está
acostumbrado a procesar la información; en cambio, la deducción parte de una generalización o regla y la va
desarrollando o explicando; La inducción presenta la información partiendo de ejemplos que se van uniendo
para formar un cuerpo de conocimiento que es probable de ser generalizado. Como verás estas formas de
procesamiento son opuestas.
También existe la analogía, que nos permite entender un concepto complejo al comparar éste con un concepto
similar ya conocido por nosotros. Ésta es una forma eficiente para comprender conceptos complejos, pero no
debemos olvidar que no existen conceptos idénticos, por lo que al hacer analogías, es tan importante concen-
trase en las similitudes como en las diferencias de los conceptos que se están comparando.
se desarrolla
GENERAL A
PARTICULAR
DEDUCTIVO
a partir de
Presentación
de una regla o
generalización
ANALÓGICO
TIPOS consiste en
DE
se infiere RAZONAMIENTO
de BUSCAR UN EJEM-
PLO SIMILAR PARA
PARTICULAR A
EJEMPLIFICAR UN
GENERAL
EVENTO
se basa ejemplo
en
Aspectos
SISTEMA SOLAR
particulares de un
vs
fenómeno
INDUCTIVO ÁTOMO
128
/cgi-bin/offsite.cgi?http://www.newscientist.com/about/usa/usa.html/cgi-bin/off-
site.cgi?http://www.newscientist.com/about/usa/usa.html
HOME • NEW SCIENTIST • NS+
BIOTERRORISM SPECIAL REPORT:

ALL FALL DOWN
by Robert Taylor
One hundred kilograms of anthrax spores could wipe out an entire city in
one go. It’s only a matter of time before bioterrorists strike.
I. Military analysts warn that we should now be on our guard against bio-
terrorism, a new type of savagery that kills civilians but spares their homes
Generalización and offices, strikes without warning, and against which there may be no
defense. What is more, although this threat requires no radically new te-
chnology, the laboratories of academia and the biotech industry indirectly
contribute to its development.

II. A few hundred kilograms of a properly “weaponized” bacterial prepara-
Desarrollo tion, carefully dried and milled to a precise particle size, has the potential to
wipe out the inhabitants of an entire city in a single strike. A nuclear bomb
in the hands of a deranged person has long been the stuff of nightmares,
Idea 1 but the materials needed to make such a device are hard to obtain and ex-
ceedingly tricky to assemble. Biological weapons are not nearly so difficult
to manufacture.

III. Many experts say that it is no longer a question of whether a major
bioterrorist attack will occur, but when. “It is really a matter of time”, says
Idea 2 microbiologist Raymond Zilinskas of the University of Maryland Biotechno-
logy Institute in College Park, who participated in the UN’s hunt for Iraq’s
biological weapons after the Gulf War. “I don’t understand why it hasn’t
happened already”.
¿Cuáles son?
IV. Two factors make the threat of a bioterrorist attack greater than ever
before, says Kyle Olson, a chemical and biological weapons analyst at TASC,
a firm of defense consultants in Arlington, Virginia. First, the unspoken ta-
boo that previously dissuaded terrorists from using chemical or biological
weapons against civilians has now been broken. On 20 March 1995, the
nihilistic Japanese cult Aum Shinrikyo unleashed nerve gas on the Tokyo
subway, killing 12 people and hospitalizing five thousand. Aum was also
developing biological weapons. Second, with the explosive growth of basic
biological research and biotechnology, what was once regarded as esoteric
knowledge about how to culture and disperse infectious agents has spread
among tens of thousands of people.

V. The threat does not come from the fictional mad scientist engineering
129
a deadly new germ, says Zilinskas, although the technology to create a Sa-
tan bug may soon be within our grasp (see ‘What if . . .’). Instead, the wi-
despread use of the basic tools of industrial biology has put the power to
create ‘traditional’ biological weapons in the hands of tens of thousands of
people. ‘Advanced biological technologies have spread all over the world,’
says Zilinskas. ‘There are many more people who are technically trained,
and the methods for culturing large quantities of bacteria are well worked
out and commonly employed.’

VI. Olson agrees: ‘A person who is smart, determined, trained in basic mi-
crobiological techniques, and willing to take a few short-cuts on safety and
go at a few technical problems in mildly unconventional ways, could concei-
vably do some horrible things.’

VII. Horrible indeed. Bioterrorism is distinguished not only by its mode of
killing, but also by the potential scale of destruction-thousands of times
as many people as could be killed by a typical car bomb. That awesome
potential has caught the attention of the US government. A 1993 report on
weapons of mass destruction by the US Office of Technology Assessment
(OTA) lists the diseases that could be employed as biological weapons. They
include plague; tularemia, a plague-like disease; and botulism, caused by a
toxin from the common food-poisoning bacterium Clostridium botulinum.
But the most chilling reading in the report is the story of anthrax, the origi-
nal biological warfare agent.
Low-tech weapons

VIII. Anthrax, a disease of cattle and sheep caused by Bacillus anthracis, can
also kill humans. The external form of the disease, which sometimes strikes
people who handle infected fleeces, causes unpleasant sores. The pneumo-
nic form is far more serious, killing more than 90 per cent of its victims if left
untreated. The key to triggering the second form of the disease is to create
and disperse spore-containing particles of exactly the right size-between 1
and 5 micrometers-to ensure that they are retained in the lungs. As few as
8000 spores per person reliably causes a lethal infection. The spores cross
the epithelial lining of the lungs and travel to the lymph nodes, where they
germinate, multiply, and then spread to the other tissues, releasing toxins
as they go. The first symptoms include vomiting, fever, a choking cough and
labored breathing. Antibiotics can cure patients in the earlier stages of the
disease. Without antibiotics, death from hemorrhage, respiratory failure or
toxic shock follows within a few days.

IX. Apart from acting on intelligence, another defense would be to res-
trict access to the tools of bioterrorism, including starter cultures. In March
1995, Larry Harris, a microbiologist and a member of the Aryan Nations
white supremacist group, used a forged letterhead and his professional cre-
dentials to order samples of Yersinia pestis, the organism that causes bubo-
nic plague, from the American Type Culture Collection, a clearing house for
130
microbiological samples in Rockville, Maryland. The ATCC dutifully mailed
the samples, but in the nick of time staff became suspicious that Harris did
not have the expertise to handle plague and the vials were recovered uno-
pened. Harris is being prosecuted for mail fraud-owning plague, it transpi-
res, is not illegal in the US. In Britain any company that wants to keep lethal
pathogens must prove to the government’s Health and Safety Executive
that it has adequate containment facilities. But, according to spokesman
Mark Wheeler, the HSE has no jurisdiction over private citizens. Lindsey
French of the Department of Health confirms that people may keep lethal
pathogens at home. But she says that threats to do harm with those patho-
gens, transporting or storing them improperly, or obtaining them by fraud
or theft, are illegal. Not that would-be terrorists need obtain their patho-
gens through official channels. If you know where to look, many can be
isolated from the wild.
Graphic: Anthrax attack on Washington DC (38K JPG file)

From New Scientist, 11 May 1996, Volume 150, Issue 2029
_________________________________
Ejercicio 1. Decide si la información es un hecho u opinión, del autor y completa la tabla con la información
que se te solicita.
Idea Contenido Hecho Opinión
131
¿Encontraste relaciones causales en el texto? ¿Cuáles son?

______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
¿Qué formato presenta este texto?

______________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________
132
TEMA 26: TEXTO INDUCTIVO
Objetivo: Al término de este tema serás capaz de reconocer y comprender la secuencia lógica de un texto
que presenta sus argumentos al inicio para desarrollarlos a lo largo del texto y llegar a una conclusión
utilizando las estrategias adecuadas para su comprensión.

Computer Violence: Are Your Kids at Risk?

Some video games are teaching children to kill for the thrill
By Stephen Barr
http://www.readersdigest.com/rdmagazine/specfeat/archives/computerviolencea-
reyourkidsatrisk.htm
Archived on: 12/14/98 January ― SPECIAL REPORT
I. Dinner was almost ready when the killing occurred. Don Wise wandered
Caso particular into the living room of his home in Leawood, Kan., one evening last Sept-
ember. His ten-year-old son, Mike, and a 12-year-old friend were sitting in
front of a large-screen television set. They were playing a video game they
had rented called Goldeneye 007, one of the top-selling titles of 1998.

II. Standing behind the boys, Wise saw that the video, rated T (Teen) for
ages 13 and older, depicted the shooter’s point of view, with his large gun
jutting into the bottom of the TV frame. After a few minutes Mike’s friend
cornered an unarmed opponent and held the gun to his head at point-blank
range. “You can’t get away!” the boy said with a maniacal sneer, taunting
the character on the screen. “You’re mine!”

III. The boy pushed the button and shot the character in the face. Blood
splattered the lab coat of the character as he whirled and fell. “You’re
down!” the boy said, laughing.

IV. Chilled by the child’s obvious glee, Wise ordered the boys to turn the
game off. “This game is disgusting,” he said sternly. “I don’t want you to play
with this anymore.”

V. Explains Wise, “I’m not going to invite somebody into my house to teach
kids to kill.”
Desarrollo Murder and Mayhem
VI. Video games have become a pervasive form of entertainment in the

1990s. Today an estimated 69 percent of american families own or rent
video and computer games. Most are harmless entertainment, but in far
too many of the most popular ones, kids are acting out realistic violent ex-
Ejemplo 2
periences on their TV and computer screens. They are severing heads and
snapping spines in Mortal Kombat IV. They are scorching the high school
133
band with a flamethrower until they burn to death in postal.
VII. “These are not just games anymore”, says Rick Dyer, president of the
San Diego-based Virtual Image Productions and an outspoken critic of titles
with violent and sexual content. “These are learning machines. We’re tea-
ching kids in the most incredible manner what it’s like to pull the trigger.
The focus is on the thrill, enjoyment and reward. What they’re not learning
are the real-life consequences”.

VIII. Interactive video games introduce kids to a fantasy world that features
amazingly lifelike characters, detailed images of brutality, and an audio mix
of heart-pounding music, macabre sound effects and authentic voices. Un-
like movies and television, where you watch the violence, the game lets you
feel the sensation of committing violent acts. When you’re into the game,
you’re in the game.

IX. “The technology is becoming more engaging for kids,” says David Walsh,
president of the National Institute on Media and the Family (NIMF), a wat-
chdog group in Minneapolis, “and a segment of games features antisocial
themes of violence, sex and crude language; unfortunately, these themes
are a segment that seems particularly popular with kids ages eight to 15”.
Action Games
X. With the rapid evolution of game technology comes a generation of titles

portraying three-dimensional, 360-degree environments that are virtually
real. “We are moving very close to a real cinematic experience, pushing the
boundaries of what a TV set or computer monitor can deliver,” says Steve
Grossman, chairman and CEO of ASC Games. “In the next five years there
will be nothing you cannot portray. “Grossman makes no apologies for the
remarkable success in blood and gore, saying these features are a way to
“get people to talk about the game”. In Grand Theft Auto, a 1998 ASC relea-
se, kids get to assume the role of a low-level mobster and perform various
murders and other felonies to impress their boss. Because of the cartoon-
like design, Grossman insists the game is a parody. “If anyone takes Grand
Theft Auto seriously”, he says, “they have a real problem separating fantasy
from reality”. (The game has been taken seriously by officials in France and
Great Britain, who have condemned it; the Brazilian government has ban-
ned it.)
XI. During Christmas 1997, Postal was another title that generated contro-
versy. In that game kids control a character known among players as The
Postal Dude who “goes postal” when the bank forecloses on his house. On
their rampage, players gun down anything that moves, including parishio-
ners leaving a church. One victim wails, “My eyes! I can’t see anything!” The
Postal Dude occasionally mutters, “Only my gun understands me”.

XII. For decades the public has decried the increasing violence in Holly-
wood movies and on prime-time television. Researchers conclude there is
134
a measurable increase of three to 15 percent in an individual’s aggressive
behavior after watching violent television.
XIII. “With a video game kids don’t just observe an aggressor rewarded;
they experience the direct reward,” says Stanford communication professor
Donald Roberts. “Engaging in these activities rather than watching them
increases the potential for the negative effects to take hold”.

Ejercicio 1. Decide si la información es un hecho u opinión del autor y completa la tabla con la información
que se te solicita.
Ej. Contenido Hecho Opinión
1. ¿Qué formato presenta este texto?

____________________________________________________________________
2. ¿En qué párrafo del texto se encuentra representado el título del mismo?
____________________________________________________________________
135
ANEXOS
RESUMEN GRAMATICAL DE LO MÁS HABITUAL DE LA LENGUA INGLESA
SUSTANTIVOS
No
Compuestos Contables Contables
SINGULAR PLURAL SINGULAR PLURAL SIN PLURAL
notebook notebooks chair chairs furniture

lamp post lamp posts pen pens love
classmate classmates party parties salt
milk
Plurales Irregulares Sustantivos Contables y Sustantivos No Contables y

Artículos Artículos
a car
the car the perfume
3 cars
man men each/every car a little perfume
woman women both cars much perfume
child children a few cars enough perfume
person people many cars too much perfume
foot feet enough cars a lot of perfume
tooth teeth too many cars lots of perfume
mouse mice a lot of cars no perfume
knife knives lots of cars some perfume
wife wives no cars any perfume
some cars perfume is nice
any car
cars are nice
136
PRONOMBRES Y ADJETIVOS
Objeto
Personales Directo Posesivos Reflexivos Demostrativos Relativos Indefinidos
I me mine myself this one

you you yours yourself who someone
he him his himself that no one
she her hers herself which any one
it it its itself these something
we us ours ourselves that somewhere
you you yours yourselves those
they them theirs themselves
ADJETIVOS
Posesivos Demostrativos Comparación Superioridad
er - than the ___ est

more - than the most ____
CORTOS (1 SÍLABA) short/er short/est

my this Cuya wide/r wide/st
your terminación “y” big/ger big/gest
his that se transforma en happ/ier happ/iest
her “i” latina
its these
our more the most
your those
their LARGOS interesting interesting
(MÁS DE 1 SÍLABA) beautiful beautiful
confortable confortable
good- better best

COMPARATIVOS bad - worse worst
IRREGULARES much more most
many least
little less
few
137
TABLA DE AUXILIARES
FORMA PRESENTE FORMA PASADO
AUX DO/DOES en ne- AUX- DID en negativos e

gativos e interrogativos, interrogativos, la forma
HÁBITOS la forma afirmativa lleva ACCIÓN en pasado del verbo en
“s” en la 3ra. persona TERMINADA el
singular: afirmativo:
Does she work? Did you work?
I don’t work. I didn’t work.
He works. she worked.
ACCIONES EN AUX BE (am, is, are). ACCIONES EN EL PASADO AUX. BE (was/were)

PROGRESO Y I’m mexican. QUE NO SE I was reading a book
DESCRIPCIONES I’m reading. TERMINARON when a friend phoned.
ACCIONES QUE YA AUX- HAVE + PP. DEL SEÑALA UNA AUX HAD +
COMENZARON VERBO. ACCIÓN QUE PP. DEL VERBO.
PERO QUE ANTECEDE A OTRA
CONTINUAN EN EL She has been studying EN EL PASADO She had left when the
PRESENTE Karate. mechanic arrived.
can/be able to......habilidad, permiso, posibilidad.

could.....................habilidad pasada, petición, permiso, posibilidad.
AUXILIARES will (won’t)............future actions, promises, requests, offers.
MODALES would(‘d)...............condiciones, peticiones, invitaciones.
must/have to.........obligaciones, necesidad.
should/ought to.....sugerencias.
may.........................permiso, posibilidad.
might......................posibilidad.
138
ALGUNOS TIPOS DE ORACIONES COMPLEJAS DEL INGLÉS
VOZ PASIVA Books are sold all over the world.

Verbo “be” + pp. del verbo principal. The president was elected yesterday.
A city in space will be inhabited.
CLAUSULAS RELATIVAS I know the man who was here.

Se forman con “who, which y that”. I know the man that was here.
Here is the book which I read.
Here is the book that I read.
After we finished eating we went to the

CLAUSULAS ADVERBIALES movies.
Se forman con adverbios de tiempo, modo y lugar. We ate popcorn while we were watching T.V.
George went home because he had to study.
TABLA DE CONECTORES Y SUS FUNCIONES MÁS COMUNES
FUNCIONES DE LOS CONECTORES CONECTORES
again, also, and, as well as, besides, both...and,

ADICIÓN further, furthermore, in addition to, likewise, mo-
reover, similarly, then, too, what is more, as well.
although/though, but, either/neither, except, howe-
ver, in contrast to, in spite of/despite, nevertheless,
CONTRASTE notwithstanding, on the contrary, on the one hand/
on the other hand, or/nor, otherwise, rather, still/
yet, whereas, even though, while.
as, because of, because, due to the fact (that), due
CAUSA to, on account of, since.
accordingly, as a consequence, as a result, because,

EFECTO consequently, for that reason, give rise to, hence, as
a result of, is/are due to, lead to, produce, result in,
so, then, therefore, thus.
139
after a while, after, afterwards, as soon as, at last,
before, during, eventually, ever since, further, lately,
DE TIEMPO later, next, presently, recently, since then, since,
thereafter, until, when, while.
finally, in brief, in conclusion, in short, in sum, in
CONCLUSIÓN summary, on the whole, to conclude, to sum up.
except that, if/ whether...or not, in case, on condi-
CONDICIÓN tion that, provided that, unless.
for example/for instance, in other words, in the

EJEMPLIFICACIÓN same manner, namely, that is, that is to say, to
illustrate.
actually, as a matter of fact, certainly, in fact, in-
ÉNFASIS deed, of course, truly.
PROPÓSITO so that, in order that, in order to, in a hope that.
ENUMERACIÓN first, second, last, the former, the latter, both.
140

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MANUAL DE COMPRENSIÓN

Dra. Raquel Guadalupe García Jurado Velarde.

a) Realizar la lectura silenciosa independiente (Lectura Ágil, Eficaz, Analítica y Óp-

b) Extraer de un texto la información relevante para cumplir un objetivo de lectu-

c) Poseer una competencia lingüística adecuada (domino de las estructuras sin-

d) Interpretar el léxico necesario para una comprensión adecuada de textos de

f) Resumir por escrito las ideas fundamentales expuestas en un texto, de acuerdo

UNIDAD 1 LECTURA ANALÍTICA

2 TEMA 1: Introducción a las estrategias de lectura

UNIDAD 2 LECTURA ÓPTIMA

69 TEMA 15: Causalidad I

136 ANEXOS DE GRAMÁTICA INGLESA

ARE WE UNDERESTIMATING MT. VESUVIUS?

¿Qué interpretaron? La descripción de Plineo el joven.

a. Aplastados por las rocas.

Lee el siguiente texto y responde los ejercicios que le siguen.

Ejercicio 2. Subraya las palabras clave y los conectores.

Ejercicio 3. Localiza las relaciones temporales del texto.

ARE WE UNDERESTIMATING MT. VESUVIUS?

Sun Aug 15, 2010 03:51 PM ET

CONECTOR TIPO DE CONEXIÓN

Vesubio hace Mastroloren-

VI) THE TEAM

IX) THE ONE

V F 1. Las víctimas de Pompeya murieron quemadas por la lava.

ADICIÓN CONTRASTE CAUSA ALTERNATIVA EFECTO

and but because accordingly

A continuación se encuentra la tabla de conectores más comunues:

although/though, but, either/neither, except, however, in contrast to, in spite of/despi-

ÉNFASIS actually, as a matter of fact, certainly, in fact, indeed, of course, truly.

PROPÓSITO so that, in order that, in order to, in a hope that.

ENUMERACIÓN first, second, last, the former, the latter, both.

PÁRRAFO CONECTOR TIPO DE UNIÓN -adicción, contraste, etc) Y CONCEPTO FORMADO

Enunciado tópico al principio del párrafo.

Enunciado tópico al final del párrafo.

Enunciado tópico en la parte media.

Enunciado tópico dividido entre el principio y el final del

Diagrama de un párrafo sin detalles de apoyo.

1) Forrester Research says 15% of the US popula-

TEXTO ENUNCIADO TÓPICO

1) Able to store entire encyclopedias on one sil-

1) A study produced by the California State Universi-

TEXTO ENUNCIADO TÓPICO

1) Ian Pearson, a futurologist at British Telecom,

1) “Just as the Industrial Revolution changed manu-

TEXTO ENUNCIADO TÓPICO

1) Computer crime has been the growth industry of

Lee el siguiente texto y responde los ejercicios que le siguen.

Ejercicio 1. Localiza los párrafos dependientes y las oraciones tópico.

WHAT’S RIGHT ABOUT BEING LEFT HANDED

Párrafo Oración tópico Detalle de Contenido

V F 1. Los zurdos en Norteamérica representan el 20% de la población.

V F 2. La herencia es uno de los factores que explica la lateralidad de una

por medio de compuestas

ORACIÓN TÓPICO más DETALLES DE

forman BLOQUE DE forman

Ejercicio 1. Localiza las ideas principales y decide a que subtema pertenecen.

LEAD POISONING: THE SILENT EPIDEMIC

XIX. The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children be screened

XX. Prevention is even more important. Public-health specialists have intensified

XXIII. Finally, beware of imported ceramic dinnerware. Consumers can purchase a

Ejercicio 2. Contesta las siguientes preguntas.

1. ¿En qué productos encontramos el plomo que es nocivo para la salud?