Ielts Reading Perparation
Preparing for the IELTS test with Holmesglen Institute of TAFE
The reading component
The IELTS reading test takes one hour. In this time you are required to read three texts of between 500 and 900 words each. The texts and questions increase in difficulty. There will be around 40 questions to answer and record on the answer sheet within the 60 minutes. Most students come out of the reading test feeling that there wasn’t enough time to complete the exam paper. For this reason it is very important that you take a number of timed practice reading tests before the actual exam day to develop the skills of skimming and scanning and other timesaving strategies. In the following pages you will find information and practice questions to prepare you to answer some of the most common types of question in the reading test: ♦= Summary completion ♦= Matching headings to paragraphs ♦= Identifying the writer’s views ♦= Multiple choice ♦= Selecting factors ♦= Table completion ♦= Matching causes and effects ♦= Sentence completion ♦= Short answer questions
Sample reading text
The reading text on the following page is longer that usual and is used as the basis for all the questions and examples in this section. However, in the real IELTS test the 40 or 50 questions will be based on three texts not just one, and the questions will not test your understanding of a point in the text more than once, as they may do here.
© 1999 Holmesglen Institute of TAFE
1
Sample reading text
Lessons from the Titanic From the comfort of our modern lives we tend to look back at the turn of the twentieth century as a dangerous time for sea travellers. With limited communication facilities, and shipping technology still in its infancy in the early nineteen hundreds, we consider ocean travel to have been a risky business. But to the people of the time it was one of the safest forms of transport. At the time of the Titanic’s maiden voyage in 1912, there had only been four lives lost in the
The reading component
The IELTS reading test takes one hour. In this time you are required to read three texts of between 500 and 900 words each. The texts and questions increase in difficulty. There will be around 40 questions to answer and record on the answer sheet within the 60 minutes. Most students come out of the reading test feeling that there wasn’t enough time to complete the exam paper. For this reason it is very important that you take a number of timed practice reading tests before the actual exam day to develop the skills of skimming and scanning and other timesaving strategies. In the following pages you will find information and practice questions to prepare you to answer some of the most common types of question in the reading test: ♦= Summary completion ♦= Matching headings to paragraphs ♦= Identifying the writer’s views ♦= Multiple choice ♦= Selecting factors ♦= Table completion ♦= Matching causes and effects ♦= Sentence completion ♦= Short answer questions
Sample reading text
The reading text on the following page is longer that usual and is used as the basis for all the questions and examples in this section. However, in the real IELTS test the 40 or 50 questions will be based on three texts not just one, and the questions will not test your understanding of a point in the text more than once, as they may do here.
© 1999 Holmesglen Institute of TAFE
1
Sample reading text
Lessons from the Titanic From the comfort of our modern lives we tend to look back at the turn of the twentieth century as a dangerous time for sea travellers. With limited communication facilities, and shipping technology still in its infancy in the early nineteen hundreds, we consider ocean travel to have been a risky business. But to the people of the time it was one of the safest forms of transport. At the time of the Titanic’s maiden voyage in 1912, there had only been four lives lost in the