Critical reading is the ability to evaluate the credibility of a piece of writing. All writers have a purpose when they write, and usually, a writer will choose or emphasize facts and details which support his or her purpose, and ignore facts which don't. As a good reader, you need to be aware of that.

In this exercise, you will see a number of quotations from different "interest groups" or "lobbies". A lobby or interest group is a group of people who have a common interest and who work together to publicize and promote their point of view. In the exercise, you will read quotations from five lobbies:

The forestry industry: The forestry industry makes money from cutting down trees. Therefore, they want to be able to continue to cut trees, and they want to discourage any alternative ways of producing pulp and paper.

The environmentalists: The environmental lobby want to protect the forests against logging companies, so they would like to show how destructive logging is, and how valuable the forests are.

The hemp farming lobby: The hemp farmers would like the fibre hemp plant to be legal so that they can grow it. They want to show how useful it is for making paper and other products, and they would like people to understand the difference between the marijuana plant and the fibre hemp plant.

The marijuana legalization lobby: These people would like marijuana to be legal. They are interested in linking the fibre hemp plant with marijuana because they think it may be possible to legalize BOTH kinds of plant. They want to show how useful industrial hemp is, and at the same time, they want to convince people that marijuana is harmless.

The Canadian government: The Canadian government has just legalized industrial hemp, but they want to keep marijuana illegal, so they want to show that it is dangerous. They also get lots of taxes from the forestry industry, so they do not want to restrict logging too much.