Intro to the IELTS Reading Paper

Intro to the IELTS Reading Paper

It sometimes feels like the people who set the reading paper of the IELTS exam have deliberately decided to set you an impossible task – and in some ways that is true! If you want to calmly read and consider every sentence, ponder every word and mull over each paragraph, then I can almost guarantee that you won’t complete the test in the time allowed. But this isn’t some cruel game the examiners are playing with you, in fact they do it for a very good reason. As a test that is used for university admission, the IELTS exam has to try and reflect the kind of reading you have to do when studying for a university degree. That is to say, dealing with large volumes of written text, some of which is important to you, but most of which isn’t. 

Obviously, the IELTS exam doesn’t present you with a library and tell you to write a thesis! Rather, it gives you three passages (another word for ‘texts’) of about 900 words each, and makes you answer a total of 40 questions, so about 13 or 14 questions for each passage. To complete it successfully in the one hour allowed, the you’ll need to quickly assess the questions and decide what information you’ll need to answer it, analyse the text to decide what information is important to you and where that information is located, and then efficiently understand the meaning of that important information and use it to answer the questions.

What are the passages about? 

The passages could be about almost any topic, from science and technology to history, music, art and architecture. They are generally in a semi-academic, informative style and intended for a reader who has a good level of education but does not necessarily have any specialist knowledge of the subject matter. All the passages are taken from authentic sources, such as journals, magazines and newspapers – so these are ‘real’ texts that were intended for an audience of native English speakers.

What kinds of questions do I have to answer?

There are several different types of questions, each with its own particular format and requiring different strategies from the reader. Some of the most common ones are listed below:

1. Matching paragraph headings.
2. Matching paragraph information.
3. Yes/No (or True/False)/Not Given questions
4. Sentence completion and Summary completion.
5. Multiple choice and list selection.
6. Matching sentence endings.
7. Completing tables, diagrams and flow charts

How much time do I have?

You’ll have a total of one hour to do the whole paper so try to keep to just 20 minutes for each passage. The time is very short, so you’ll need to be smart about how you approach the tasks. For example, it’s usually a good idea to read some (though not necessarily all) of the questions before you start reading, so that you are reading with a purpose. Often the questions go in the same order as the passage, so you can read the questions and the passage at the same time. There might be some sections of the passage that you don’t read at all, because you don’t need that information to answer the questions.

How many questions do I need to get right?

For each reading paper IELTS produces a band score conversion table which will translate your score out of 40 to an IELTS band score from out of nine. The conversion does vary depending on the difficulty of that particular paper, but the score to aim at is 30 points out of 40. Most of the time this will give you a band 7, and if you are just below you’ll still get a perfectly respectable band 6.5. Anything under 20 points and you’re looking at band 5 or below.

Follow our blog for more specific tips and strategies on the IELTS reading and other papers.