Reading IELTS

possible If you read enough “native English” before the exam,

you will become more and more confident in looking at texts where you don’t understand every word.
Time management – experiment to see what works.
Strategy :
how long you look at the text before answering questions
how long you spend on each question
how long you spend on each group of questions
how long you spend on each text
do you leave time at the end to go back at look at unanswered questions?

for getting an overview of a text; the eyes ‘skim’

rapidly over the page, just picking out the main ideas and topics.
 Scanning also involves rapid movement through a text, but looking for specific key information rather than the gist.

of questions
Train yourself, don’t test yourself

The questions or the

text – which do you read first

you did not choose to read it.
There are few

clues. (make some predictions about the passage). What is the passage about? What is the main idea? Who are the characters? When are things taking place? Where is it happening? Why is it important?

a capital letter or is it in italics?
a capital letter

– (probably) a proper name.
(In this case, you should waste no time in trying to understand what the word means)
in italics - almost certainly a scientific/technical term that you do not need to understand.

Empire, and became very popular in the United Provinces which are now

the Netherlands. Tulip cultivation in the United Provinces is generally thought to have started in earnest around 1593 after the Flemish botanist Charles de l’Écluse had taken up a post at theUniversity of Leiden and established the hortus academicus.

dangerous medical procedure, ultimately cost him his life.

words which relate to that word and work out what

it must mean. These words may be either synonyms (words with a similar meaning) or opposites. “The fossils were originally dug up in Kazakhstan by a group of German archaeologists who were looking for evidence of prehistoric culture. Some time later the bone fragments  were taken to Belgium to be exhibited in a museum specializing in natural history.”

the general meaning of the sentence and make a guess

at the probable meaning of that word. (the more you guess meanings, the more correct you are). “Skin cancer is a common disease. According to Cancer Research UK, around 100,000 cases of non-melanoma were diagnosed in the UK in 2008, and just under 12,000 cases of the more dangerous malignant melanoma were also registered of which 25% proved fatal”.

here is recognise parts of words and relate them to

other words you do know. Again, this will mean you are “guessing” and sometimes you may make mistakes, but you should be correct more often than not. “The archaeologists unearthed the bones in Kazakhstan, while looking for evidence of prehistoric civilisations”.

the weakest skill in that it gives you the least

amount of information about the word. However, it can sometimes help to know whether you are looking at a verb, noun, adverb or adjective. “In five years time the skills for conducting fundamental science in the UK will not be here, because everyone will be chasing money to work on the widget the EPSRC thinks will solve societal problems”.
an unusual word “widget” - the word must be a noun as it follows “the” and this helps you understand that it must be a thing of some sort. In fact, all “widget” means is “thing”.