Education & Career

How many "f" do you count in this sentence?

How many f do you count in this sentence?

FINISHED FILES ARE RE-
SULT OF YEARS OF SCIENTIF-
IC STUDY COMBINED WITH
THE EXPERIENCE OF YEARS.

Most people find three. In fact, there are six!

A well-awake seven-year-old boy or a professional proofreader will see six "f" because they have been trained to give equal value to all words.

When we learn to read fast, we select the most important words, leaving it to the brain to fill in the gaps. The more we read, the more words we miss, and we can quite easily manage to read more than six hundred words per minute. Obviously, a scientific text implies a slower reading.

A quick reader focuses on the most important words, usually nouns and verbs. Adjectives and adverbs come next, followed by articles, pronouns and prepositions. Experienced readers pay less attention to the least important words, which in English are often very short. This is why the "of" aren't included in the count.

To conclude, I submit the following sentence to you:

THE
SILLIEST
MISTAKE IN
IN THE WORLD

To persuade her seven-year-old students to reread what they write, my aunt wrote this sentence on the board. Her best students immediately read "The silliest mistake in the world", to which she replied: "You just did it." It was the slowest readers who discovered the double "in". It was then that the school principal entered the classroom, and read the message aloud, but mistakenly. The class replied in chorus, "You just did it, sir."

How many "f" do you count in this sentence?
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