How to solve IELTS: Reading section
The Reading section is, in my opinion, the easiest part of the IELTS exam. Writing and Speaking test your active vocabulary, Listening tests your concentration. And in Reading, you can return to the first question at any time, you can (theoretically) take a minute off. And this is also a litmus test of whether you should take the IELTS exam or any other language exam now, or wait and raise your level even more.
How to find the right answers? Naturally, the faster you read, the easier it will be. The general algorithm is simple.
In IELTS Reading you will see three texts and a variety of questions about them.
Main types of questions:
1) Check the information from the statement with the text (TRUE, FALSE, NOT GIVEN)
2) Fill in the gap in the sentence with a word from the text. It is important to read the task carefully, it specifies the number of words that should be in the gap. Sometimes it is one word, sometimes two. If you write two words, contrary to the task, that answer, although more complete, will not be counted
3) Match the headings with the paragraphs of text
4) Write the number of the paragraph containing the information corresponding to the statement
5) Select from the given statements those that correspond to the author’s position regarding a specific problem.
The main thing when answering is to operate only with information from the text. You cannot rely on your experience, knowledge, or common sense. It is necessary to clearly find confirmation of your answer using key words (words/synonyms that match both in the question and in the text).
As a rule, the answers in the text follow the questions in the section. For example, 7 TRUE-FALSE-NOT GIVEN questions are given. The answer to the first question will be in the first or second paragraph, all subsequent answers follow it. The next section may contain a fill-in-the-blank question – and again you need to find the place where the first answer to the first question of the section will be – all subsequent ones will follow in the text.
Let us illustrate the algorithm for finding an answer for questions of the TRUE-FALSE-NOT GIVEN type and questions with filling in the blanks.
The following statement is given:
By keyword – in this case “third phase…” we find the paragraph. We need to understand whether some “sandstone slabs” were located both outside and inside Stonehenge.
It is easy enough to establish that this statement is TRUE. Indeed, “placed” in the paragraph has been replaced by the more advanced “arranged” or “assembled,” “outer areas” by “outer crescent,” and “middle” by “center.” It all fits together.
Another type is filling in the blanks:
You can write a maximum of two words in the gap. If you write one, and the text had a more complete answer with two words, the answer may not be accepted.
This is the very first question, so the answer is probably in the first or second paragraph. We need to find some material from which the tools were made.
The simple verb “made” from the statement was replaced with “fashioned”, and the preposition “from” was replaced with the analogue “of”. From there, everything is simple, “deer antlers”, no matter what part of the deer “antlers” are, will be the correct answer.
As you can see, it is necessary to have a large enough vocabulary to quickly identify synonyms (this applies more to verbs than to nouns: “antlers” is a specialized word, but we take it together with “deer” because together they form a compound noun). In the Academic version, as we have seen, more elementary vocabulary is often used in questions so that anyone can understand the meaning of the question (by the way, this also applies to the Speaking section), but it is often useless to look for the same wording in the text – the vocabulary there is more advanced. In IELTS General, a simplified version of IELTS, in my observations, synonyms are used much less often – that is, the statements, in terms of the vocabulary used, coincide with what is written in the text.
The general algorithm for finding the answer will look like this:
1) Read the title of the text, you can quickly run your eyes over it to understand its structure;
2) Carefully read the text of the task to understand what the answer should look like;
3) We read the statements/questions, immediately identify key words that cannot be replaced in any way – for example, century, proper names – they will help us find the place in the text where the correct answer may be;
4) Find the right place and choose the correct answer.
The main difficulty in Reading is time. You have 60 minutes to answer all the questions, so sometimes it makes sense to skip some questions where you have doubts and move on to the next ones. Most people will be able to answer all the questions correctly, but not in 60 minutes – this is the trick of IELTS. With practice, I learned to answer all the questions correctly in the allotted time, but, of course, in the exam, in a nervous environment, my results were worse than at home – I incorrectly transferred some answers to the form, so I recommend taking the computer version of IELTS to avoid such mistakes.
How to improve your results? First, you need to find the tests used during the exams. They are contained in the “IELTS Academic” or “IELST General” collections from Cambridge. There are currently 19 editions of such tests. At the beginning of my preparation, I spent time doing tests on websites – this was a mistake. Tests on websites often do not match the structure of the exam, they can differ in difficulty (it can be prohibitive; when I started preparing using the official test collections, my results improved by one point).
You download as many of these collections as possible and solve all the tests, at first you can not adhere to the strict limit of one hour, but the closer to the exam, the less time you need to spend on one test. Gradually, you will develop an algorithm for finding an answer, you will be able to maintain concentration for one hour and your results will improve.
In the process of preparing for IETLS, I used the help of a teacher only in Writing and Speaking, that is, active skills. I do not really believe that a teacher can improve the results in Listening and Reading in a short time – you are either ready and need a couple of months of practice, or you have gaps in grammar, vocabulary and you cannot yet read fluently. In this case, you need to improve the general level of the language. Specifically for Reading – you need to read articles on various popular science topics, even those that may not be interesting to you. The larger the vocabulary, the easier it is to get the required score, although you cannot try to translate all the words – the scanning skill is much more important.
At the same time, grammar in all its manifestations is still needed; knowledge of it helps a lot to quickly select the necessary parts of speech from the text, which can be inserted into the gap.
Another point – as a rule, if students have studied using classic textbooks like English File, then they are already prepared for various types of assignments for texts and audio recordings, although, probably, easier ones.
I think training is necessary, you need to get used to the format, although the results on the day of the exam may still vary, depending on your physical condition. For the video, I decided to do the Reading tasks for one text, while explaining my choice. I have not done IELTS tests for about a year, although I have occasionally worked with students wishing to take IELTS.
Of course, it is quite difficult to think and comment at the same time, and there will be mistakes, for example, in the video I did not read one sentence and, as a result, made one mistake. After watching the video, I realized that I was going to go back and reread the paragraph again, but I did not do so. In the first text there were two types of tasks – exactly those that were analyzed earlier.
I will try to finish the test. The second and third parts should be more difficult, there will be other types of tasks, so there may be more mistakes, but in general, I am sure that if you regularly solve these tests in combat mode, with full concentration, then you can eliminate mistakes altogether.
Source – my channel for english learners
