Tips for the preparation of the IELTS reading Section, these are applicable to both General and Academic IELTS tests

# Do not waste time reading the text before you look at the questions. Do glance through it quickly so you know what type of text it is (e.g. travel brochure, magazine article) and what the topic is. Then go straight to the questions and let each question guide your more detailed reading.

# You will not lose marks for grammatical, spelling or punctuation errors (unless, of course, your answer is impossible to understand!).

# For most questions, a short answer is fine. There is no rule that you should write in full sentences. In fact, you would be wasting valuable time if you wrote lots of long answers.

# The first 15-20 questions require fast (but accurate!) reading: think of the 1 mark questions as needing about one minute of reading on average.