After hearing the opening passage from Edgar Allan Poe's The Fall of the House of Usher, host Wally Amos introduces the format of the five Reading programs. He shows a method that will be instrumental throughout the entire series: looking for context clues to find the meanings of difficult words. As an example, two women at a coffee break discuss the word jargon. Wally Amos also discusses the difference between concrete and abstract, and shows examples of figurative language.