IELTS Academic Reading

Three passages, 40 questions, 60 minutes, and no extra time to write your answers on the answer sheet. That last point is worth fixing in mind before anything else: Listening allows ten minutes for transfer and Reading allows none, and candidates who expect otherwise lose answers they had already found.

IELTS Reading question types

Matching information to paragraphs

You are given a fact and asked which lettered paragraph contains it. Letters may repeat, so finding one answer does not remove a paragraph from consideration. These questions are not in passage order, which is what makes them slow: there is no way to work down the passage answering them as you go.

The information is usually paraphrased rather than quoted, so scanning for a matching word finds the wrong paragraph as often as the right one.

True, False and Not Given

A statement either agrees with the passage, contradicts it, or is not addressed by it. The distinction that costs marks is the second and third: False means the passage says otherwise, and Not Given means the passage says nothing either way.

The trap is reasonableness. A statement may follow from what the passage says without the passage saying it, and that is Not Given. A passage reporting that bees following a dance reach the food does not claim they forage more successfully than bees that do not, however plausible the inference.

These questions do follow passage order, which is the one help they offer. If you have located question 5 in the fourth paragraph, the answer to question 6 is below it.

Yes, No and Not Given

Identical in form to the previous type and different in what it asks. True and False concern facts stated in the passage; Yes and No concern the views of the writer or of a person the passage describes. A statement may be factually true and still take No, because the writer argues against it.

Matching headings

A list of headings is given, longer than the number of paragraphs, and each is used once at most. A heading must cover the whole paragraph rather than one striking sentence in it, which is how the wrong headings are constructed: they name something the paragraph genuinely mentions but does not amount to.

Sentence, summary and note completion

You supply missing words, taken from the passage, within a stated limit. The words must come from the passage exactly as they appear there: a synonym of the right answer is marked wrong, and so is a correct word in a different grammatical form where the sentence requires the original.

Multiple choice and short answer

The familiar types, and generally the quickest. Multiple choice questions follow passage order. Short answer questions ask a direct question and carry the same word limit as completion items.

The word limit is part of the question

An instruction reading NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS means an answer of three words is wrong, whatever it contains. This is the most avoidable way to lose marks in the paper, and it is lost by candidates who found the right answer and wrote too much of it.

Hyphenated words count as one. Numbers written as figures count as one, and AND/OR A NUMBER in the instruction means a figure is permitted alongside the word allowance rather than instead of it. Articles count toward the limit, so where two words are allowed, the committee uses both of them.

Spelling is marked. An answer spelled wrongly is wrong, and both British and American spellings are accepted where they differ. Capitalisation is not marked, so an answer in capitals is as acceptable as one in lower case.

How to spend the hour

Twenty minutes a passage is the usual division, and it is worth treating as a limit rather than a target. The third passage is the hardest and its questions carry the same single mark as the first, so time spent on the last question of passage one is worth exactly what it costs at the end.

Read the questions before the passage. This is the reverse of how most people read, and it works here because the questions tell you what to look for and the passage rewards nobody for being enjoyed.

Leave nothing blank. There is no penalty for a wrong answer, so a guess is free. On True/False/Not Given a guess has a one in three chance, and on matching questions the odds are better still if you have eliminated some paragraphs.

Where marks are lost

Choosing False when the answer is Not Given. The passage has to contradict the statement, not merely fail to support it.

Matching on a repeated word. Question writers place the vocabulary of the question in a paragraph other than the one containing the answer, precisely because scanning is the obvious strategy.

Paraphrasing a completion answer. The words have to come from the passage. An answer that means the same thing in different words is marked wrong.

Running out of time in passage three. The commonest single cause of a band below expectation, and the one most easily prevented by leaving passage one on schedule whether or not it is finished.