IELTS Reading: forty answers against the clock

Sixty minutes, forty questions, and — unlike Listening — no extra time to transfer anything. Whatever is not on the answer sheet at the hour is not marked. Reading is the section where good English speakers most often underperform, because it is not really a reading test: it is a paraphrase-recognition test with a stopwatch attached.

The one-minute version: budget twenty minutes per passage and protect the third one, which is usually the hardest. Answer every question — there is no penalty for a wrong guess. And learn the True/False/Not Given rules properly; they account for more lost marks than vocabulary does.

What you will be reading

Academic gives you three long passages from books, journals and magazines, written for a general audience but on unfamiliar subjects — and that is deliberate. You are not expected to know anything about the topic.

General Training gives you three sections that get progressively longer: short everyday texts (notices, advertisements, timetables), then workplace material (contracts, staff handbooks), then one longer piece of general interest.

Remember that the General Training conversion needs more correct answers for the same band — see how the scores work.

The clock plan

Twenty minutes per passage is the standard split, but apply it with one adjustment: the third passage is normally the most demanding, so finish the first two a minute or two early rather than late. Two habits protect the plan:

Transfer as you go. On paper, write answers on the answer sheet as you settle them, not in a batch at the end. People lose five or six marks a year to the bell arriving mid-copy.
Abandon on time. If a question has cost you more than about ninety seconds, put a mark against it, write your best guess, and move on. A blank scores the same as a wrong answer, and the question you never reached is the expensive one.

True / False / Not Given — slowly

Three outcomes, and they are about the text, not the world:

True — the passage says this, or unambiguously means it.
False — the passage says the opposite. There is a contradiction you can point at.
Not Given — the passage does not settle it either way.

Two rules follow. First, your own knowledge is irrelevant: a statement can be perfectly true in reality and still be Not Given. Second, Not Given is a normal answer, not a cop-out — if you have finished a set without using it, check again.

The reliable method is to find the part of the passage the statement is about, then ask: can I underline the words that make this true, or the words that contradict it? If neither underline exists, it is Not Given.

Watch the qualifiers, because they are usually the whole question. All, most, some, never, only, the first — a passage saying "many researchers" does not support a statement saying "all researchers", and that makes it False rather than Not Given.

And Yes / No / Not Given, which is not the same task

When the question set says Yes/No/Not Given, you are tracking the writer's claims and opinions rather than factual statements. The mechanics are identical; the thing you are matching against is what the author argues, which means the giveaway language is evaluative — unfortunately, surprisingly, it is clear that.

By question type

Matching headings

A heading describes what a whole paragraph is doing, not a detail inside it — which is why the tempting heading usually matches one vivid sentence. Do this set last for its passage: by then you will have read the detail for the other questions and the structure is obvious. Cross off headings as you use them, and leave the hardest paragraph until the choice has narrowed.

Matching information to paragraphs

Different task, often confused with the above: here you are hunting a specific fact, and paragraphs can be used more than once or not at all. Scan rather than read.

Sentence, summary and note completion

Words must come from the passage and must obey the word limit, so copy exactly — including the plural -s — and check the completed sentence is grammatical. If a summary comes with a box of words to choose from, the words will be paraphrases of the passage, not lifted from it.

Multiple choice and short answer

Long options reward underlining the difference between them before you go back to the text. Short-answer questions still carry a word limit.

Matching features and diagram labelling

Matching features (usually to researchers or dates) is a scanning task — names and numbers are the easiest things in the passage to find. Diagram labelling follows the passage's own sequence.

Scanning: what is findable and what is not

Names, dates, numbers, capitalised terms and technical words survive into the questions unchanged, so they are anchors — find them first. Everything abstract will have been paraphrased, which is the test. "Reduced the cost of production" becomes "made manufacturing cheaper"; the sentence you want will not share a single content word with the question.

That is also why vocabulary is the real ceiling here. Reading practice that never builds vocabulary stops paying off quickly: keep a list of the paraphrase pairs you missed, not single words.

How to practise so it transfers

Timed, then untimed, in two colours. Sit the passage in twenty minutes and mark it. Then redo the ones you got wrong with no clock at all, in a different colour. A question you can answer untimed is a speed problem; one you still cannot answer is a language problem. Those need different work.
Log by question type. After three passages you will usually find two types carrying most of the damage — commonly matching headings and Not Given. Drill those types alone rather than sitting more whole tests.
Read something hard every day. Twenty minutes of unfamiliar non-fiction does more for your reading band than another practice test does, because it is the ceiling you are raising. The practice-test page covers how to space the tests themselves.

The rest of this section

Each skill has its own page, and the practice-test page covers how to use them together. The section overview has the band-score arithmetic and the Academic/General Training split.