This book provides a unique method of learning and sharpening your Spanish language skills. For the advanced beginner or intermediate-level learner, reading offers you the most convenient way to practice and sharpen your Spanish and monitor your progress: the more you read, the greater your knowledge of the language. However, you probably don't have the time, patience, or interest to tackle original literary works or course textbooks. Better Reading Spanish brings you short passages that reflect real-life, contemporary issues and situations, taken from magazines, the Internet, books, and newspapers. Each chapter features articles that cover a specific topic - cuisine, music, sports, cinema and theater, art, the family, today's lifestyle, or politics and history - with each piece becoming more challenging as the section progresses.Here you will find an article about the Seattle Mariners' Edgar Martinez, a tourist pamphlet from Honduras, a recipe for gazpacho, and more than fifty other selections to help you improve your reading speed and understanding. Following each article is a set of exercises that help your comprehension of that piece, as well as develop invaluable reading skills including: skimming material for general meaning; scanning for details; using word formation, cognates, and context to determine meaning; understanding idioms and artistic expressions; an appendix provides suggestions for websites and publications for further reading. Better Reading Spanish will not only help you improve or revive your language skills, it will open up the enjoyable and exciting world of reading in Spanish.