Developed for Chinese learners who are at the elementary or intermediate level, Chinese Reading Series aims at improving the learners' reading skills comprehensively through the carefully selected materials and designed exercises which train students' skills in fast-reading, summarization and deduction. The difficulty and amount of vocabulary, the content, length and difficulty of the texts and the exercise types are close to HSK guideline, which helps the students to adapt themselves gradually to the Reading Comprehension in HSK. The revised edition reduced the amount of units from the original 20 to 18, to better go with the teaching syllable. The reading materials are modified, with old content updated, grammar pointed standardized, and old-fashioned words and views renewed. Meanwhile careful research and detailed revision has been done to the exercises to make them closer to HSK.

Zhang Lina is an assistant professor in Chinese School of Xi'an International Studies University. She has been engaging in teaching and research of Chinese as a foreign language for many years. Her academic interest is methodology of teaching Chinese as a foreign language.