Here are two facts: Reading makes you smarter and the more reading you do the better.

In a paper called “What Reading Does for the Mind” by Anne E. Cunningham, associate professor of cognition and development at the University of California made a case study and claimed that reading:

-increases vocabulary

-boost general knowledge

-helps keep our memory and reasoning abilities intact as we age

Researchers today believed that reading pour more words into the human brain than conversation and television.

Cunningham’s paper ranked the frequency of 86,741 English words. A word’s frequency is how often a word appears in speech or writing. In speech the average word frequency is 400, meanwhile words in the children books, which people think are simple, have an average frequency of 627. In other words children’s book is more sophisticated than the average conversation.

The only way for you to expand your vocabulary is to learn “rare” words and you can only encounter them through reading a printing page. In a news paper, 68.3 words per 1,000 are “rare”. In children’s literature books, 30.9 words per 1,000 are rare. On prime-time TV it sinks to 22.7 and in conversations it sinks even lower, 17.3 words per 1,000.

It is true that the smarter you are the more stuff you know. Relatively, how much you read was shown to have a big impact on how much you know and by extension, how smart you are.

If you read more, you will likely know more about general facts. Cunningham found out that the more you watch TV, the more likely you will understand a question wrong. But, the more you read, the more you will give right answers. General ability did not matter here; the amount of reading vs. television consumption did.

Reading a lot can also protect your mind when the wear and tear time starts. Even if you reach midlife and over, you can still deliver a strong logic and deductive reasoning if you increase how much you read today.

So even if you are talking to well-educated people, your best shot at expanding your vocabulary is by reading. In fact, an early start in reading is important in predicting a lifetime of literary experience. The act of reading can compensate for modest levels of cognitive ability by building your vocabulary and general knowledge.