Ielts Reading Test – Techniques to Improve Your Ielts Band Score

British merchants established a trading post in Singapore in the early nineteenth century, and for more than a century trading interests dominated.

Reading Tip: matching headings
You should read the headings before reading the text to focus your mind on the main ideas you need to look for.

What can I do to improve my performance at the Reading test?
• Make sure you answer the questions asked. It might help to read the questions before you read the passage.

• Manage your time. Do not spend too much time on a question you find difficult. Answer the others and then come back to it.

• Look at visuals and subtitles to get a general idea of what the passage is about.

• Identify the topic sentence in each paragraph. This will give you a clue to the answers.

• Use reading strategies such as skimming and scanning to help you find the answers. Don't worry if you do not know the meaning of every single word in the text. Try to guess the meaning of the words you don't know from the context.

• Correct grammar and spelling are important.

• Make sure you go through your answers to check if they are relevant to the questions asked and if the language used is correct.

The questions test a variety of reading skills including your ability to do the following:
• Identify the writer’s overall purpose.

• Follow key arguments in a text.

• Identify opinions and attitudes.

• Locate specific information.

• Distinguish main ideas from supporting details.

• Extract information from a text to complete a diagram, summary, table or set of notes.

Question Types
In each section, you have to do several different tasks. These include:
• Answering multiple choice questions

• Writing short answer to questions

• Completing sentences, notes, a summary, a flow chart or a table

• Labelling a diagram

• Classifying ideas into different categories

• Matching (e.g. headings to paragraphs or people to ideas)

• Deciding if ideas or opinions are correct, incorrect or not given