For a lot of people, the IELTS academic reading exam is a nightmare. You must answer forty questions regarding three texts, each of which may include more than a thousand words. This is a massive amount to handle in one hour. It is, however, far from impossible to earn a high score, and many individuals are able to score band 8 or 9 just by having a decent attitude to the exam.
Do not work to figure out everything
The first thing you should realize before starting to prepare for IELTS academic reading is that you do not need to comprehend every word in the texts. Many people believe that reading is all about knowing 100% of the information, but that is not the aim of this test. Instead, you must rapidly and efficiently search the text and extract important information based on the queries.
Increase your reading speed
You must be a quick and efficient reader with just one hour to answer forty questions across three distinct reading books. If you go too slowly, you will simply not have enough time to answer all of the questions, which will result in tragedy. While it is important to examine the information from Tip #1, you must also read rapidly. This is a difficult skill for those who speak any language, but there are many approaches. You may practice by downloading numerous applications or just reading articles every day to increase your natural speed.
Scan and Skim
In addition to the previous two suggestions, you should learn how to skim and scan an article. To put it simply, skimming implies quickly scanning an item for the key concept (the gist). This includes examining headers, subheadings, captions, and so on. After that, you may scan. After reading through the list of questions, scanning involves going through fast to select out certain terms. This helps with Tips #1 and #2 since you may significantly boost your speed and accuracy by skipping over any non-important sections of a text. After that, you might spend some time close reading to get the correct answer. A mixture of these methods can help you get a high IELTS score.
Synonym Words
When looking for solutions in the text, don’t make the mistake of looking for the identical terms you saw in the questions. If you query, “How long does it take the average shipping container to arrive?” you won’t find the phrases “how long,” “average,” or “arrive.”
Instead, you will look for words and phrases that have the same meaning throughout the text. For example, it may read, “Shipping containers typically take around three weeks to reach their destination.” In this context, “three weeks” answers “how long,” “typically” means “average,” and “reach their destination” means “arrive.” This is one of the most crucial skills you can master, which is why having a diverse vocabulary is so vital.
Discover The Many Types Of Questions
While we’re on the topic of sentence completion, it’s worth noting that there are many different sorts of questions that might come in IELTS reading. These will not be at random, nor will there be an endless amount of them. Rather, there are a few popular question types: multiple choice, matching headers, phrase completion, brief response, and so forth. If you spend some time examining them, you will get acquainted with the specific abilities required to obtain those solutions. Whatever the topic of the passage, you would just use your typical abilities and look for the proper answer.