Documente Academic
Documente Profesional
Documente Cultură
You a very short amount of time to answer a large number of questions on very complicated texts. You need to develop very good reading skills to get a 6.5. Band Score or higher and have a range of strategies prepared in order to tackle it. Here are some tips:
Focus
Focus on the text first, the questions second! A good understanding of the text helps you answer the questions more efficiently and effectively.
Categorise
IELTS exam writers select a range of specific types of texts. Learning to recognize the type of text you are reading can help you predict its structure and therefore understand it more quickly. There are four types of IELTS texts a) analytic texts, which discuss the reasons why something happened or make recommendations or explain a concept b) descriptive texts, which describe a situation, explain how something is done or categorizes something c) discursive texts, in which different opinions are expressed about an issue and d) narrative texts, which explain a chronological sequence of events.
Skim
Develop your ability to skim. Skimming is reading quickly by skipping over unimportant words like prepositions and ignoring difficult words that you dont need to understand. Do this to get a general idea
Scan
Learn to scan. Scanning is what you do when you look for a price in an advertising text or a name in a telephone book. When you scan you do not actually need to read the text but move your eyes quickly over it. You can scan from left to right or right to left, from top to bottom or bottom to top. Do this to find the location of answers in the texts looking out for easy to spot words like numbers, dates and words beginning with capital letters such as place names.
Structure
Learn to recognize paragraph structure. This often involves spotting the relationship between the main ideas and supporting ideas in a paragraph. Paragraphs are most frequently descending, i.e. they begin with the main idea somewhere near the start and develop from there, although some, frequently the first and last paragraphs of a text, are ascending the main idea is located towards the end. This can be particularly helpful when matching headings to paragraphs.
Overview
Get an overview of a text before dealing with the questions. Do this by reading the title and subtitle as well as focusing on the beginnings and ends (but not JUST the first and last sentences) of paragraphs. This helps you process the information in a text (and thereby answer the questions) more quickly.
Parallel Phrases
Learn to spot parallel phrases. These are different ways of expressing the same thing, such as, I like to ski and skiing is enjoyable. Many questions, e.g. YES NO NOT GIVEN questions and gap fills, test your ability to match up a similar phrase in the task with its equivalent in the text.
Don't Panic
Dont panic when you encounter an unknown or difficult word. IELTS texts are packed with highly specialized vocabulary. Skip over difficult words which are not essential for your understanding of the text. For words you do need to understand, practice trying to guess their meaning using the overall context of the text and sentence as well as the form of the word e.g. is it a noun or verb.