Calculating Estimated Reading Time

An interesting thing we can do with our word helper methods is to calculate an estimated reading time for a piece of text. From an implementation standpoint, it is relatively straightforward: we need to know the number of words within the text and have a value for the average number of words people read in some time frame. An analysis of 190 studies estimates that the average reading time was between 238 and 260 words per minute, depending on the genre. This estimate was arrived at by looking at the reading time of adults silently reading English text. For our use case, we will use the lower value of 238 words per minute for nonfiction in our calculations.