hi everyone it's therese with ielts english gurus today we're speaking about reading for the ielts
exam managing your time do you feel that you're stuck at bound score 5.5 or 6 or 6.5 in that case
this video could be helpful for you because we'll speak about how to save time so that
we can bring up your level and even if you're already a really good reader in fact losing time
can stop you from getting the best score so just a quick reminder of the reading exam itself
that there are three long passages 700 to 1000 words you have 60 minutes and 40 questions
so the time is pretty intense that's why in the video i'm focusing on what i call a question
focused strategy so rather than devoting too much time to the passage you should be devoting
your time to the questions so as soon as you see that exam paper or the computer-based test
you're honing in on the questions you're looking at what they are what types of questions they are
and understanding them because of course you don't know the answers until you know
the questions and the questions will inform you as to what the answers are what bound
score level do you want do you know how many questions you need to answer let's take a look
so to get band score level 7 you need to answer 30 questions correctly that means you can afford
to miss about 10 questions if you want bound score level 8 you can afford to
lose 5 questions so you should be going for 35 correct answers for band score level 8.
how can you save time in ielts reading number one know the types of questions that come up
number two read the questions first three give more time to the last passage
in ielts reading number four identify the key words and possible synonyms in the questions
number five skim scan and use close reading techniques familiarize yourself with the
questions from ielts reading so that's multiple choice identifying information that's the same as
true false not given identifying writers views claims matching information headings features
sentence endings sentence completion summary table or flowchart completion diagram completion
and short answers and if you're not familiar with these types of questions well then take a look at
the practice tests from cambridge and the british council to start getting to know these questions
because they're quite different to other exams like toefl or toeic they're really unique to ielts
so good to know what you're looking at okay so here's an example of a ielts paper this
is actually taken from cambridge and as you can see it's a very long passage on the left
a lot of technical scientific language and then on the right you have the questions
so when you look at it we're going to hone in on the questions first the vocabulary is indeed
very scientific i'm not a scientific person myself and to be quite honest i don't know a lot of the
words in this passage but don't worry about that all you need to do is to highlight the key words
that come up in the questions so then you're going back to the passage you're looking for
the extract in the passage with those key words okay but of course you need to study the question
first looking at the questions chronobiology evolved rise and fall sea levels rhythms therapies
some of these words you know some of them maybe you don't know you can learn this level
of vocabulary from reading a variety of texts including scientific texts or academic texts
texts from journals from books skimming is when you skim for general meaning scan is when you
have a specific word that you're looking for and then close reading is when you found the
extract with the information and you're reading very carefully you're applying careful reading
to get your answer just a quick recap everyone so the passages increase in level of difficulty
so it's better to give more time to the last passage which is the more difficult one so giving
more time to the last passage and giving less time to the easiest passage vocabulary is very very
important of course for doing well in reading so do everything you can to improve your vocabulary
the best thing you can do is to devote 20 minutes every day to reading in english now i know that
seems like a lot of time but i promise you that if you devote 20 minutes every day to reading
it will really improve your level of vocabulary create a notepad in your phone or on your computer
and start writing down or typing words new words that you learn every day
use a dictionary to find meaning use a thesaurus to find synonyms and over the next few weeks if
you devote your time to reading you'll notice that you're doing better and better in reading
thank you for watching everyone good luck and ielts reading see you in our next video bye