IELTS preparation: the essentials

This site once ran a dedicated IELTS-practice section (the old Go Global pages, with listening tests and quizzes), and those links still bring people here. The full practice banks are gone, but here is the distilled advice they were built around.

Know the shape of the test

• Listening (30 min) — four parts, increasing difficulty, answers come in order. The skill being tested is prediction: in the 30 seconds before each part, read the questions and guess what kind of word fills each gap (a name? a number? a day?). Spelling counts — a correctly-heard, misspelled answer scores zero.
• Reading (60 min) — 40 questions, three passages. Manage the clock: 20 minutes per passage, and skim the passage before touching the questions. True/False/Not-Given trips everyone: "Not Given" means the text doesn't say — not that you think it's unlikely.
• Writing (60 min) — Task 2 (the essay) is worth double Task 1. Budget 20/40 minutes, plan for five of those, and answer the actual question asked; a beautiful essay on a slightly different topic caps around band 6.
• Speaking (11–14 min) — fluency and coherence outweigh fancy vocabulary. Extended answers beat perfect short ones; "I think X, because Y, for example Z" is a band-raising habit that costs nothing.

Band scores, honestly

Most universities want 6.0–6.5 overall; competitive programs 7.0. Moving up half a band typically takes 6–8 weeks of daily practice, not a weekend of tips. Cambridge's official past-paper books (the numbered series) remain the only practice material that perfectly matches the real test's difficulty.

IELTS and studying in China

English-taught degree programs at Chinese universities accept IELTS (usually 6.0+) in lieu of their own English tests, and scholarship applications look stronger with a score attached. If that's your route, pair this with the Study in China guide — deadlines there apply to you.