Many people find the reading section difficult. Remember that the IELTS is testing your ability to use a range of reading skills, in a very strict timeframe, and not everyone has enough time to read through every sentence of every text, AND answer the questions. You have only 1 hour to read 3 texts, that’s a lot of information! So what should you do
Get interested in reading! First of all, read a couple of magazines on a topic that interests you (sport, cars, photography, etc) and then start timing yourself, so you can improve your reading speed. Then once your speed has improved, move onto more IELTS related topics, technology, language, environment, science, innovation, etc, and try reading those for speed too
Remember to check for new vocabulary AFTER you have read the paragraph. You need to learn how to guess the meaning of a word, based on the context it is in, while reading quickly, so always check the meanings of words later
After improving your general reading skills, learn the specific reading skills of skimming and scanning, because these will help you to answer the reading questions. Once you master these two skills, you’ll find you have much more time to read through and properly answer the questions. Skimming a text gives you an overview of the article and its main points, whereas you use scanning to help you find the right location to detail read to find the answer
First, read the questions, then skim quickly through the text, highlighting key words that you think relate to the questions (try giving yourself about 2 mins for this), you can often just read the first sentence in each paragraph. Then go through the questions one by one. Identify the key word in the question and scan the text for the key word (or a synonym of it), then detail read to answer the question. Then move on to the next question. If there is a question you are stuck on, move on and come back to it at the end of the test if you have time
Make sure that when you are practicing that you always time yourself (including the writing of the answers on the answer sheet) and don’t go over 20 mins per passage
!When looking for articles to practice, Check out these online sources
(The Guardian Newspaper (three editions; UK, US and Australian http://www.theguardian.com/au
The Australian Geographic /http://www.australiangeographic.com.au
New Scientist /http://www.newscientist.com
The Economist /http://www.economist.com
