First of all I suggest that you improve your listening skills http://www.italki.com/knowledge/page/IMPROVE%20YOUR%20ENGLISH%20LISTENING%20SKILLS.htm Then you can improve your reading skills here http://www.italki.com/knowledge/page/How%20to%20improve%20your%20reading%20comprehension%20in%20English.htm

Come on,honey..don't get worried,I'd like to share you some suggestions. Firstly,I think it's necessary to read the whole article,because you need to know the article structure,but it doesn't matter whether you really can understand the essay at the first time,but you just need to browse through it. Secondly,you can find out the key words of every article,this always works(Our teacher told us). Thirdly,pay high attention to the first or the last sentence of every article..it probably be the sentence which can summarize the whole article....If this still cannot help you,then you can try to summarize each paragraph's meaning by yourself,yeah...this can time-consuming,but once you have got used to it,then you'll know the meaning of articles without summarizing...hope these can help to improve your ability of reading comprehension.

the best way i used myself when learning it at the very beginning, is newspapers, magazines and music Lyrics (the interest here is simply to get the habit of short sentences some little paragraphs.... then as a second step reading a lot of short stories...the last step novels...Good luck!

If the activity is multiple-choice, let me suggest "guessing."