IELTS preparation: the essentials
This site ran a dedicated IELTS section for years — listening lessons, reading tests, writing feedback and a numbered practice bank — and those links still bring people here every day. The practice banks themselves are gone. The teaching behind them has been rebuilt as five maintained guides: one per skill, plus one on how to practise.
Listening
Four parts heard once. Prediction, distractors, spelling, and map labelling.
Reading
Forty questions in sixty minutes with no transfer time. True/False/Not Given, matching headings, and the clock.
Writing
Task 2 is worth double. Question shapes, the thesis sentence, overviews in Task 1, and what cohesion really marks.
Speaking
Three parts, recorded. The long turn, extending answers, and what fluency is actually scored on.
Practice tests
Where the real material is, how to sit one properly, and the error log that does the actual work.
Common questions
Band 8, Not Given, the Part 2 prompts, Academic vs General Training — including the three this site declines to answer.
The test at a glance
| Section | Time | Questions | What it actually tests |
|---|---|---|---|
| Listening | ~30 min | 40 | Predicting what kind of word fits a gap, then hearing it once |
| Reading | 60 min | 40 | Recognising paraphrase at speed |
| Writing | 60 min | 2 tasks | Answering the exact question asked, in a readable shape |
| Speaking | 11–14 min | 3 parts | Keeping going, and organising thought out loud |
Listening and Speaking are the same test for everyone. Reading and Writing differ between the two versions below.
Academic or General Training?
Academic is for degree-level study and most professional registration. General Training is for migration, work and below-degree courses. Pick the one the receiving institution names — not the one that looks easier, and not after the fact, because you cannot swap versions once you have sat the test.
They are not scored on the same curve either: the raw-score-to-band conversion for General Training Reading requires more correct answers than Academic Reading for the same band, because the texts are less demanding. A practice score from the wrong version tells you very little.
How the scores work
Each skill gets a band from 0 to 9, in whole or half bands. The overall band is the mean of the four, rounded to the nearest half or whole band — a mean ending in .25 rounds up to the next half band, one ending in .75 rounds up to the next whole band. The arithmetic is worth doing before you decide what to work on:
- 6.5, 6.0, 6.0, 6.0 averages 6.125 and reports as 6.0.
- 7.0, 6.5, 6.0, 6.0 averages 6.375 and reports as 6.5.
So a single half-band on one skill can move the overall figure, and the skill to push is rarely the one you enjoy practising.
Listening and Reading are marked mechanically: a raw score out of 40 converts to a band. Writing and Speaking are marked by a trained examiner against four published criteria each, equally weighted within the skill:
- Writing — task achievement (Task 1) or task response (Task 2), coherence and cohesion, lexical resource, grammatical range and accuracy.
- Speaking — fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammatical range and accuracy, pronunciation.
Because the four are equal, the quickest gain is almost always in your weakest criterion rather than your strongest. The descriptors are published, and IELTS explains the scoring in detail — read the band above the one you are getting, not the band you want.
Band expectations, honestly
Most universities want 6.0–6.5 overall; competitive programmes ask 7.0, sometimes with no individual skill below 7.0. Moving up half a band usually takes six to eight weeks of daily work, not a weekend of tips — treat "band 9 in two weeks" material accordingly.
The exception is worth knowing, because it is common: if your score was dragged down by a technique failure rather than a language ceiling — you ran out of time and left ten reading answers blank, or wrote 180 words in Task 2, or answered a different question than the one on the paper — that can be fixed quickly, because your English was never the problem. Sitting one properly timed practice test tells you which of the two you are.
If one skill alone is holding the overall down, IELTS also offers a One Skill Retake; availability depends on your test centre and test mode, so check before you plan around it.
Paper or computer
Same questions, same scoring, same examiners. The differences that actually affect preparation:
- Listening transfer time. On paper you get ten extra minutes at the end to copy answers onto the answer sheet. On computer you type as you go and get roughly two minutes to check. That ten minutes is a real spelling-and-tidying window, and losing it changes how you take notes.
- Reading. On paper you annotate the page freely; on computer you highlight and use a notes box. Both work, but they are different habits.
- Results. Computer-delivered results come back in days, paper-based in about a fortnight — see your results.
Choose one and practise in that mode. Practising on paper for a computer test is how people discover on the day that they cannot skim a passage in a scroll box.
Taking IELTS in mainland China
If you are sitting the test in mainland China, registration does not run through the global booking site: it goes through the National Education Examinations Authority at ielts.neea.cn, with payment and ID handled there. Seats in the big cities go quickly in the peak application months, so book before you feel ready rather than after.
IELTS itself is run jointly by the British Council, IDP and Cambridge, who between them produce the question material and publish the only practice tests that match the real difficulty — the practice-test page covers which ones and how to use them.
IELTS and studying in China
English-taught degree programmes 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 — the deadlines there apply to you, and they are earlier than most people expect.