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Ielts Reading
Date: 9/27/2023 IELTS Reading tips and things you should know about

IELTS Academic Reading: Basic

Information.
The Reading Test is immediately after the Listening Test. You do not get a break.

There are 3 sections in the Reading Test. Each section has 13 or 14 questions, making 40 questions
in total. The test lasts 60 minutes, and in that time, you must write your answers on an answer
sheet.

Here are some of the problems that students have with IELTS Reading:

Time is the biggest problem. Many students don't manage to finish the test.
The texts are long and contain some difficult vocabulary.
Students find "which paragraph contains information" type of questions difficult.
Students find "true/ false/ not given" questions difficult.

IELTS Reading is really a test of your vocabulary and comprehension. If your knowledge of
English words and phrases is good, and you don't struggle to understand when you read texts,
you will dowell.

When are the answers in order?

For the following question types, the answers are usually (almost always) in order in the passage:

All types of gap-fill (sentences, summaries, diagrams etc.)

True, false, not given
Yes, no, not given.
Multiple choice
Matching sentence endings
 'Short answer' questions

However, answers to the following question types are never in order:

Matching paragraph headings

Which paragraph contains the information?
Matching names with statements or information

The time problem

'Not having enough time' is the biggest problem for most people taking the reading test.
Here are some tips for dealing with this problem:
Go straight to the first question. Don't waste time reading the full passage or the first
sentence of each paragraph, and don't read any of the other questions.
Do 'paragraph' questions last. Questions that ask you to match headings or statements with
paragraphs are much easier if you are already familiar with the passage.
Don't get stuck on one question. As soon as you realize that you are having difficulties with a
question, leave it and move to the next one. Return to difficult questions later if you have
time.
Remember that the answers to most question sections are in order in the passage. You don't
need to go back to the beginning of the passage to search for each answer.
Only skim or scan for numbers and names. Otherwise, read at normal speed.
Work with an alarm. You can't do this in an exam, but at home you could set the alarm (on
your phone) for 2 minutes and try to do each question within this time.

"Keyword technique' steps

1. Read the first question and underline "keywords". These are the words that you think you
will need to search for in the passage. They are the words that communicate the meaning of
the question: normally nouns, verbs and adjectives.
2. Read the passage at normal speed from the beginning. Look out for the keywords from the
question, or any words which have a similar meaning (look for synonyms and paraphrasing).
3. Underline the keywords that you find in the passage.
4. Read the sentences around those keywords carefully. You may need to read them several
times.
5. Check back to the question, and compare it with the relevant part of the passage.
6. Decide on the answer.

Note: The main point of the "keyword technique" is that you have some specific words to look for
in the passage. But remember: Locating the answer is just the first step. The second step is
reading carefully, making sure you understand what you are reading, and comparing with the
question.

Skimming and scanning

Many teachers and books talk about skimming and scanning as key techniques for IELTS reading.
The words 'skimming' and 'scanning' confuse students. In fact, many students get the wrong
answers because they 'skim' too quickly and miss the words that they are looking for.

For example, if you are scanning for the word "buy" but the passage contains the synonym
"purchase", you probably won't find the answer.

So, what is the solution? Instead of skimming or scanning, students should read at normal speed.

Only scan quickly if you are searching for a name or a number.

So, forget 'skimming' and 'scanning' and focus on finding' and understanding!

Finding: read the text to find words from the question.

Understanding: when you have found some key words from the question, read that part of the
text carefully in order to understand it and get the right answer.

When to 'skim' or 'scan'

Here's some simple advice:

Skimming basically means 'reading very quickly: Only skim if you are looking for a distinctive
word that doesn't have any synonyms e.g. "Manchester".

Scanning basically means 'looking for something without reading' Only scan if you're searching
for a number e.g. "1999"

For all other questions, forget about skimming and scanning; just read the passage carefully at
normal speed.

Two questions about exam technique

1. Should you read the whole passage before looking at the questions?
2. Should you go to the questions first, then skim/scan to find the answers?

The answer to question 1 is no. You don't have time to read the whole passage unless your
English is almost 'native speaker' level.

The answer to question 2 is yes and no.

Yes - go to the questions first.

No - don't skim or scan unless the question contains a name or number.

You should do the questions one by one. Instead of skimming or scanning, read the passage
carefully. The answers to most question sections will be in order in the passage, so you will
gradually read the whole passage as you find the answers.

Read better, not faster

If you believe that you can't read fast enough, you've got the wrong idea about how to improve
your reading score.

The key to IELTS reading is to learn to read better, not faster.

If you read too quickly, or if you try to find the answers by skimming and scanning, you probably
won't fully understand what you're reading, and you might miss the answers that you're
searching for. On the other hand, if you read at normal speed, you're more likely to understand
what you're reading, and you'll have plenty of time to find the answers.

If you struggle to finish all 40 questions in one hour, it's probably because you didn't understand
the passage well enough, not because you didn't read it fast enough. So, you need to analyze your
mistakes and look up the words and phrases that you didn't understand. In other words, work

Reading better means that you understand what you are reading, and that you notice straight
away when you reach the part of the passage that contains the answer. If you read too quickly,
you'll probably miss the answer and waste time going back to look for it.

Note: If you really are a very slow reader (When reading English), this is probably because your
overall level of English is low. In other words, you're at beginner to intermediate level at the
moment, and you have to think about every word as you read. This is a normal stage in language
learning, and you shouldn't rush to read more quickly.

Finding enjoyment in reading

Your reading skills will improve more quickly if you read things in English that you enjoy!

If you see reading as a boring chore, you're going to have a hard time improving. You need to find
real enjoyment in reading; then it becomes easy.

The real secret to improving

The real secret to improving your reading is not a special trick, method or exam technique. It's
simpler than that.

If you want to improve your reading, you need to READ MORE.

Read things that truly fascinate you. Read about your hobbies, people you admire, gossip, or
whatever you would choose to read for fun. Do some reading that isn't a form of study. It doesn't
matter if you don't understand every word; just expose your brain to lots of interesting English,
and you'll learn without even realizing!

A technique to speed up: "read phrase by phrase"

People who read too quickly in the IELTS test often miss the answers. If you go too fast, you won't
really understand what you're reading, and you'll start to panic when you don't find what you're
looking for.

On the other hand, some people read too slowly; they read each word as if it were a separate item
on the page. These people tend not to finish the test.

Instead of skimming too quickly or reading each word slowly, I recommend that you read phrase
by phrase. For example, read the first sentence of this lesson as three phrases:

People who read too quickly.... in the IELTS test.... often miss the answers.

Try to get into the habit of reading phrase by phrase. You should find that you can go at a
reasonable speed and that you'll understand (almost) everything.

Paragraph questions

There are 2 types of questions that ask you about paragraphs:

1. Paragraph headings - match the sub-headings with the paragraphs.

2. Specific information - which paragraph contains the following information?
For 'paragraph headings' questions, you need to find the main idea of each paragraph. I
sometimes recommend starting with the shortest paragraph first, especially if reading
questions are difficult at this stage.
For 'specific information' questions, remember that one paragraph can contain more than
One piece of information (e.g. "paragraph A" could be the answer for questions 1 and
2).Some paragraphs may not contain any information, so it doesn't help to start with the
shortest one.

Both types of question might be easier if you do the other question sections first (gap-fill,
true/false/not given etc.). You will then be more familiar with the text, and you might even
remember where some of the 'paragraph' answers are.

Finding and understanding

IELTS reading is really a test of 2 things:

Can you find the part of the text that contains the answer?

Do you understand that part of the text?

Finding

You need to be able to find the right part of the text quickly. You should practice this a lot.

Understanding

When you have found where the answer is, you need to read that part of the text carefully. Read
the sentences before and after the keywords that you found. Then it becomes a test of your
vocabulary knowledge: if you don't understand the words that you are reading, it will be difficult
to get the right answer.

3 study tips

Here are 3 study tips to help you improve your reading:

 The best way to get better at the reading test is by doing more reading with analysis. Do as
many practice tests as you can with through analysis. Keep in mind: you WILL NEVER
improve if you do not understand your mistakes. Analyzing helps to avoid similar mistakes
in the future. In addition, and read other things e.g. books, newspapers and online articles.
Try doing a reading test without a time limit, and with a dictionary. If you still can't get the
score you need, you'll need to look carefully at what you are doing wrong.
Spend time analyzing your mistakes and the correct answers. Try to understand why an
answer was right or wrong. You'll improve more quickly if you learn from your mistakes.

Is the answer in the first sentence?

Students often ask: Is it possible to match paragraph headings to the correct paragraphs by
reading the first sentence of the paragraph only?

The answer is: sometimes. The problem is that this 'technique doesn't always work. For example,
try the following exercise.

Choose the best heading (1 or 2) for the paragraph below. Which sentence gave you the
answer?

1. The impact of telecommunications on population distribution

2. The benefits of working together in cities

It was once assumed that improvements in telecommunications would lead to more dispersal in
the population as people were no longer forced into cities. However, the ISTP team's research
demonstrates that the population and job density of cities rose or remained constant in the 1980s
after decades of decline. The explanation for this seems to be that it is valuable to place people
working in related fields together. The new world will largely depend on human creativity, and
creativity flourishes where people come together face-to-face.

(Source: Cambridge IELTS 6, test 2)

Locate, then understand

People sometimes find the keywords and still get the wrong answer. Does this mean that the

"keyword technique' doesn't work? No. If you found the keywords but still got the wrong answer,
the problem must be this: you didn't fully understand what you read.

Remember that the keyword technique involves 2 steps:

Locate the answer: underline keywords in the question, then read the passage until you
find those words (or similar words that have the same meaning i.e. synonyms or
paraphrasing).
Understand fully: read the relevant part of the passage carefully, make sure you understand
it fully, and check it against the question until you are sure that you have the right answer.
remember: Keywords don't automatically give you the answer. They help you to locate it, but
then you'll need to understand the relevant sentences).
It's a vocabulary test!

IELTS Reading is a vocabulary test! If you don't understand the words that you read in the
questions or passage, you probably won't get the right answer.

Is the following statement true, false or not given?

Some sewage networks built by the in the UK were made out of wood.

Relevant part of the passage:

Roman towns and garrisons in the United Kingdom between 46 BC and 400 AD had complex
sewer networks sometimes constructed out of hollowed-out elm logs.

Tasks:

-What answer would you give (T, F or NG)?

-Which 'keywords' would you underline in the question and passage?

-Which words do you need to understand in order to get the answer?

The importance of underlining

Hopefully you do this already, but it's worth pointing out why underlining is so important when
you're doing an IELTS reading test. Students should underline the main words in the question,
then underline any similar words that they find as they read the passage.

There are 3 reasons why underlining is useful:

1. It encourages you to use the 'keyword technique' to find the answers.
2. You don't lose your place in the passage when you're turning pages to check between the
question and the text.
3. The same information may be relevant for a later question (e.g. when you do a 'paragraph
headings' section last).

We can always tell when students have worked hard on a reading paper by the amount of
underlining or highlighting, they have done. If you don't usually underline things, start now!

Match names with statements

1. First, scan the whole passage and underline the names. Normally scanning is not an effective
method, because students often miss the answers when they scan too quickly. However,
scanning for names of people should be easy.
2. Second, underline keywords in all of the questions. Usually it is recommended to do just one
question at a time, but we break this 'rule' for any type of question that involves matching.
3. Finally, instead of reading from the beginning of the passage (the usual approach), start with
the name that is accompanied by the smallest amount of information. Read that sentence
and compare it with the question statements, looking for similar keywords as usual.
Try this 'time' experiment

But is time really the problem?

IELTS students often say that "not having enough time" is their biggest problem in the reading
test.

Try this experiment to find out how time is affecting you:

1) Normal speed

Give yourself one hour to do a full reading test (from one of the Cambridge books). Or just take
one passage and do that in 20 minutes. How many correct answers did you get?

2) Too fast

Give yourself just 30 minutes to do a full reading test, or only 10 minutes to do one passage. Use
skimming, scanning, guessing, or any other trick' to get through all of the questions. This goes
against any normal advice, but it's fine for this experiment.

3) Too slow

Give yourself 2 hours to do a full reading test, or 40 minutes to do one passage. Read everything
slowly and carefully, and aim for a perfect score!

Results:

What happened when you performed this experiment? What scores did you get at normal, fast
and slow speeds? Was time really the big problem, or did the experiment highlight any other
difficulties?

How 'deeply' do you read?

There are various different ways to read a text. If you're just gathering information, you might
scan several articles or books quickly; perhaps you might choose to quickly skim the beginning
and end of an article if you only need to get a general idea of what it's about. When surfing the
Internet, we skim, scan, click on hyperlinks, and jump around reading bits of text from here and
there.

However, if your aim is to learn a new language, you'll need to slow down and do some 'deep'
reading.

Here are some deep reading tips:

Choose one article per day. If you don't have much time, it should be a very short text, or you
could choose to read only part of the article.
Remove all other distractions. If you've chosen an online article, it might be better to print it,
or at least copy it onto a Word document.
Read the article through once at normal speed, and then see if you can write a summary of it
in five sentences or less.
  ead the article a second time, and note down both the 'facts' and the 'opinions' that it
R
contains. Is the writer of the article expressing an opinion or trying to persuade you to think
in a certain way?
Next, look at the vocabulary used in the article. Wiled. Remember: knowing the meaning of a
word is easy - the difficult this is knowing how is member knowing the meant ideas. so,
focus on the way words are used logether in collocations and phrases.
If you have time to go deeper, you could look at sentence construction: the length of each
sentence, the connectives linking words) that are used, and the order of elements in each
You could do the same for paragraph: how does the writer maintain coherence between
sentences, how are arguments developed or details added?
You could then analyze grammar more closely: nouns, verbs, tenses, articles etc.It's fine to do
quick, superficial reading too, but you should consider adding at least 15 minutes of focused,
deliberate 'deep' reading to your daily study schedule.

Read 'real' things!

It's frustrating to see students who rely on textbooks to teach them everything about the English
language. Why read an article in an 'upper intermediate' textbook, when you could be reading
real articles in newspapers or on the Internet? Read articles because you find them interesting,
not because they have been written to demonstrate a particular grammar point.

If you're stuck, diagnose the problem

Some students ask for a help with a common problem: They keep getting the same score (for
example 6.5)? Maybe you've followed all the advice, tried all of the techniques, and done lots of
practice, but nothing seems to work. You're stuck!

Before you can solve a problem, you need to diagnose what the problem is. Here are some steps
that you could take to do this with regard to IELTS reading:

1. Get a copy of one of the Cambridge IELTS books, ideally the newest one.
2. Do the first reading test in the book in one hour, like a real exam.
3. Check your answers with the correct answers at the back of the book.

Now comes the important part.

4. Analyze the mistakes that you made very carefully, and ask yourself the following questions:

• Did you lose marks because you ran out of time or had to rush?

Were there any answers that you had trouble finding?

Were there any vocabulary problems i.e. key words that you didn't understand?

•Did any of your mistakes surprise you? In other words, were there any answers that turned out
to be wrong, even though you were very confident that they were right?

You might need to do several tests and a lot of careful analysis of your mistakes to really find out
what's going wrong. But then you'll know what to work on.
First sentence of each paragraph?

People often ask whether reading the first sentence of each paragraph is a useful "trick". Is it a
good idea to read the first sentence of each paragraph before you attempt any questions? Does
this "trick" work for 'paragraph headings' exercises?

The simple answer is no

The "tricks" like skimming, scanning or reading first or last sentences of paragraphs are not a
good idea. The better approach is simple: read the question, underline words that you think you
need to find, then read at normal speed until you find the relevant part of the passage. Reading
the first sentence of each paragraph strategy is risky because it may lead you to the wrong
answer.

*The only time when it can be recommended to read the first sentence of each paragraph is if
you're rushing to finish a 'paragraph headings' exercise in the last few minutes of your exam. It is
sometimes possible to get the answer from the first sentence, so save this trick for an emergency
(when time is running out).

IELTS Reading: a good study technique

When practicing with the Cambridge IELTS books, try this study technique:

1. Choose a reading passage.

2. Go to the back of the book and get the correct answers.
3. Study the passage with the aim of proving why those answers are correct.
4. Make a keyword table.

When you know what the answers are, you can focus on exam technique: searching for
keywords, then reading the relevant part of the passage carefully. You might find this helps you
more than simply testing yourself would.

Don't 'over-think' the answer

Many students get the wrong answer because they think too much! They worry about small
differences in meaning. For example, look at the following part of a reading passage:

The two-week planned study into the psychological impact of prison life...

Now decide whether the following statement is true, false or not given:

The study aimed to investigate the mental and behavioral effects of life in prison.

The statement is true, but many students put not given because they "over-think" the meaning
of 'psychological. They think that the definition of psychological must be more complex than
'mental and behavioral.

Don't think too hard about small differences in meanings. Mental and behavioral' might not be a
perfect definition of 'psychological, but the overall meaning is the same (a simple definition of
psychology is the study of the mind and behavior).

How questions are made

The people who write the questions for IELTS reading do something like this:

1. They take a reading passage.

2. They read through the passage and stop when they find something interesting.
3. They make a question about that part of the passage, usually by paraphrasing it. For
example, if the phrase "staff salaries" is used in the passage, the question writer might create
a question with the words "employees' wages".

In other words, they use the "keyword technique" to write the questions, which is why you
should use it to find the answers.

IELTS Reading: get to the end!

Many IELTS candidates fail to get to the end of the test; in other words, they don't reach question

40. The advice is to practice getting to the end with time to spare.

The key to getting to the end is to miss any difficult questions - as soon as you feel stuck on one
question, miss it and move on quickly. You can return to the tricky questions later.

Note: The advice above might seem obvious and easy. However, you'll need to practice this
'method' many times. See how quickly you can get to the end of a test, and count how many
difficult questions you missed.

IELTS Reading: collecting vocabulary

Whenever you read something in English, it's a good idea to write useful vocabulary in a
notebook.

But don't just write individual words, write the related words too. For example, do you know
which verb is usually used with the noun "commitment"?

As an example, read the following short text:

A New Year's resolution is a commitment that an individual makes to a personal goal, project, or
the reforming of a habit in the coming year. Some examples include resolutions to lose weight,
learn something new, or give up a habit such as smoking.

Recent research shows that while 52% of participants in a resolution study were confident of
success with their goals, only 12% actually achieved their goals. A separate study in 2007 at the
University of Bristol showed that 78% of those who set New Year's resolutions fail.

Men achieved their goal 22% more often when they engaged in goal setting, a system where
small measurable goals are set, while women succeeded 10% more when they made their goals
public and got support from their friends.

Here is some key vocabulary from the text:

make a commitment to something

give up a habit
be confident of something
set measurable goals
make something public
get support from

Remember: understanding the meaning of a word is not the same as being able to use it correctly.

6 tips

How can you improve your reading? Here are 6 tips:

If you want to improve your reading, the first thing to do is read a lot. There are no shortcuts
or secret techniques; you will only improve with time and practice.
Anything you read in English is good practice, so read about subjects that interest you. Try to
enjoy reading in English.
English is the most used language on the Internet. Whenever you search for information on
the net, try searching in English first.
Remember that "understanding is not the same as using". Keep a notebook with useful
words and phrases that you find when you're reading, and try using them in your own
sentences.
Apart from reading things that interest you, you also need to read lots of IELTS passages. If
you've done all of the tests in the Cambridge books, read the passages again without doing
the questions. Use a dictionary, take notes, and try to fully understand each passage.
Another way to use the Cambridge tests is to look at the correct answers to each question
first. Then, your task is to find out why those answers are correct by analyzing the passage
carefully and finding the 'keywords'.

Be creative with your reading practice, try to enjoy the learning process, and trust that you will
improve if you persist.

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