For the non-scientist, reading a scientific abstract can be very frustrating. You can end up feeling more at sea than when you began. However, non-scientists can and do benefit from reading scientific abstracts, usually by understanding the structure and purpose of abstracts and be learning what jargon and structural features to ignore.
Abstracts mirror the structure of scientific papers themselves.
They are intended to allow busy scientists to review the content of a paper without having to read the paper, so they can decide whether to commit their time to obtaining and reading the original paper. So abstracts, even more so than scientific papers, are intended to be brief, telegraphic, and to only hint at the thought processes that are described more fully in the full paper. Because most of the readers of a scientific abstract will be specialists in the same or similar fields, there is a great deal of use of jargon to allow the writer to get to the point more quickly. A typical abstract uses headers to divide the text into logical parts. But when you read the conclusions, you need to refrain from the making the kind of conclusions that many other, non-scientific pieces of writing you have read usually expect you to make.