IELTS Reading - Skimming and Scanning

There are three passages on the reading test and each passage is a page and a half long more or less. It is very important to learn how to scan for information, i.e. how to do skimming. Don't just sit down and read the whole text, then read the questions and go back and try to find the answers. If you're doing that you're wasting a lot of valuable time. You should start out with the reading test by first of all skimming the text. Read the first paragraph & find out what that passage is about. Then go to each paragraph following that & read the first sentence. The first sentence is a topic sentence & tells you what that paragraph is about. Then read the last sentence, it's a concluding paragraph that tells you what the essay was about.

Next go to the questions. When you're looking at the questions, you want to highlight or underline or circle the keywords and immediately think of synonyms, because unless the word in the question is a proper noun (unless it's someone's name or unless it's the name of a building or the name of the city) you're not going to find that same vocabulary or the same word within the passage itself.

What is more; you should be familiar with the test question types. You're going to find questions like multiple choice questions, fill-in-the-blank questions, sentence completion questions, matching ahead into a paragraph true/false not given, i.e. a whole range of questions that you need to be familiar with. you need practice.

If you've got multiple choice questions, read the instructions carefully. Use common sense to eliminate obviously wrong answers. If you are not sure, guess. Because you're not penalized for wrong answers you're only given credit for answers that are correct. You have got the true/false/not given questions: Don't confuse with 'false' & 'not given'. 'False'- we know from the text that the statement is untrue. 'Not given'- The text does not contain the information necessary to decide.

So you need to practice before the exam that when you see the question type but you don't know what kind of question types going to come up immediately .you see the instructions you know exactly what you're doing.