This Test Will Tell You How Many Books You Could Read in a Year

With all of life’s distractions, it can be hard to make time for reading. But time spent reading can be much more rewarding than checking your smartphone.

With this in mind, Lenstore.co.uk developed a tool to measure your individual reading skills and set a reading goal that’s right for you.

The tool gives you a book excerpt to read at your normal reading speed, followed by three comprehension questions to check you understood it.

The results then show how many books you could read in a year at your current reading speed, as well as how long it would take you to finish popular novels, from lengthy tomes like War and Peace (1,225 pages) to quick reads like The Color Purple (288 pages).

People over 65 read faster than those in their 20s

Lenstore also ran a representative sample of 2,000 UK adults through the tool to discover the reading speed of different sectors of the population.

The results show that people over the age of 65 read faster than those in their 20s, 30s and 40s, and that women read faster than men.

Over-65s took 98.5 seconds on average to read the passage, while 25- to 34-year olds took 105 seconds. Women finished the test in 97 seconds, with men taking 106 seconds.

The reason older people read faster may be because people over the age of 65 spend less time looking at screens than other age groups.

According to a study from Aston University, too much time spent staring at screens on smartphones, laptops and tablets can cause digital eye strain (DES). Symptoms include eyestrain, headaches, dry eyes, and blurred vision, which may result in a decrease in reading speed.

People who read regularly are significantly faster than those who never read

Another key finding showed that people who said they read more than 50 books a year completed the test 46% than those who claimed to read 0 books a year.

Readers of more than 50 books took 76 seconds to finish the test, while people who never read took 112 seconds.

So, how fast do you read? How many books could you read in a year?

Take the test for yourself below: