My Number 1 tip for saving time in IELTS Reading

Do you find it impossible to finish the IELTS Reading questions in 60 minutes?

A common complaint about IELTS Reading is that there is too much to read in too short a space of time: 20 minutes for each text! 3 texts! 40 questions!

And what’s more, you don’t even have extra time to write your answers on the answer sheet – you have to do all of that on top of everything else!

So what can you do about it? You can’t change the length of the texts or the number of the questions or the time you’re given, that’s for sure.

BUT! You can change the way you approach the texts, and I’m going to show you how in a series of videos which I will be posting in the next few days. The videos will take you through a WHOLE IELTS Reading paper step by step and show you:

how the questions are organised
where you can find the answers quickly
ways of saving time and NOT read everything
easy ways of spotting correct answers
how to dismiss incorrect answers
how to use your common sense and background knowledge to get you closer to the right answer.

Let’s look at a Reading Passage 1

(Check out the videos below to take you through this with the Test Papers)

I’ve taken this from the British Council/Take IELTS website so that I can guarantee it is an accurate example of a real test. You can download the test here – print it off so that you can pause the video and look at the text as you watch (but everything is on the video, so if you can’t print it off, don’t worry!).

Remember:

the questions always come in the same order as the text
the text is divided in the same way as the questions
the first set of questions relates to the FIRST HALF of the text
the second set of questions relates to the SECOND HALF of the text
OK – the final question relates to the text as a whole, but that’s a different discussion

So what you need to do first is find where the first half ends and the second half starts!

This will save you so much time!

Look at the questions first – you will see that they are divided into ‘True/False/Not Given’ (Questions 1 – 7) and Multiple Choice (Questions 8 – 13).

How does this help? Look at the second group (question 8). This starts with some numbers. Now look at the text. Can you find the numbers quickly? Yes, they’re about half-way through the text.

This is where these questions will start. If you work this out first, you will know where to focus when you answer all the questions.

Now look at the text. What else do you notice?

Yes, the questions are IN ORDER and you can find them by looking for synonyms, so you don’t need to jump around looking for information and wasting time.

I go into this in more detail in the video and I will talk about this in my next blog.