IELTS Reading – all what you need to knowIn the section Reading of the academic version of IELTS exam participants need to read three texts and answer 40 questions (13-14 questions for each paragraph). In the general variant of the exam texts are simpler and shorter than in academic one. To do all the tasks of the Reading section (section on the official site) you have 60 minutes.

You can be proposed to excerpts from the books, short stories, newspaper articles and other original texts. There are numerous types of the tasks, which check the ability to read the text and understand it.

The following tips will help you find the right approach to this section of the IELTS exam:

  1. If you understand the exemplary essence of the text before reading it, it will facilitate the subsequent understanding. Attentive view of the graphs, tables, and any other illustrations often gives a clear idea about the topic of the paragraph.
  2. Remember that there is no extra time to transfer answers. Make sure that you write on the test answer sheet and not on the questionnaire.
  3. IELTS Reading is designed for people who have a quite a general education. It means that you’re not required special knowledge to understand the texts. However, some of the articles may be more formal than others.
  4. If you read the text and answer the questions in a random order, be careful that the answers are in the right place in the table of responses.
  5. If you're unsure whether your answer is correct, try to reread the text and find the right option. Remember that IELTS Reading don’t last more than an hour and you need to answer 40 questions. If you spend more than a minute on each question, you will have an extra 20 minutes to read the text. If it’s hard to find the answer, go to the next question.
  6. Of course, questions “true/false/not given” are the most difficult types of the tasks, because they make candidates to make false answer or invent their own one.

    In this video Emma will explain a specific type of question you may find in the Reading module of the IELTS: True, False, or Not Given:

  7. IELTS Reading section contains questions with words that often are not in the response. Therefore, you should pay attention to the synonyms of keywords.
  8. You may get a text with complex and long words. Very often these words convey the key of the text and thus they are indicators of the response. However, these "indicators" often carry no semantic meaning: they can be adjectives or adverbs which complete the description rather than meaning. If you start to dwell on the unknown words, you will lose time. Ignore too complex words. Try this as an exercise: take the English-language newspaper and find an article with a lot of unknown words. Cross out all these words, and then read the article and see if you understand it.
  9. If your text contains a lot of date, mark them during the reading, because often they can carry very important information.

And don’t forget to read as much as you can! If you have a good practice, you will pass IELTS Reading successfully!

Other sections of the test: