Assign Values to variables from a text file

Shell Programming and Scripting
1

The text file has one single row and looks like this

Q1      P1      2006

I have to pick up this values from a shell script into three different variables,
say quarter, period and year from the above text file. Some one know's how to do this? I went through 'sed', dint really know how to use it.

Thanks

2 
#!/bin/ksh

read quater period year < myFile2read.txt

echo "quater->[${quater}] period->[${period}] year->[${year}]"
3

i tried using awk it worked just to provide various ways to do one thing!!!

a=`awk '{print $1 }' <input`; b=`awk '{print $2 }' <input`; c=`awk '{print $3 }' <input`
echo $a; echo $b ; echo $c
4 
for WORD in $(cat file); do
  WORDS[${#WORDS[@]}]=$WORD
done

printf "Word: %s\n" "${WORDS[@]}"