How to go from IELTS Reading 6.0 to 7.5

Where the ten marks are

Mark your last three practice tests by question type and by passage. The usual band 6 profile: passage 1 near full marks, passage 2 losing three or four on matching headings or matching information, passage 3 losing five or six because only 12 minutes were left. Two or three more go to true/false/not given answered by keyword. The official anchors (band 6 at 23, band 7 at 30, band 8 at 35 for Academic; General Training needs more) are on ielts.org.

Fix the order, not the reading

Give each passage 20 minutes and do not borrow from the next. Inside a passage, do the ordered question types first (true/false/not given, sentence and summary completion, multiple choice), because they walk you through the text in sequence. Do matching headings and matching information last, when you already know what each paragraph contains. This alone typically returns three or four marks from passage 3.

Stop keyword matching

The two most-missed types are built on paraphrase. For true/false/not given, locate the statement, then compare it with the passage sentence word by word, watching qualifiers (all, only, first, more than). False means the passage contradicts it; Not Given means no evidence either way. For matching headings, read the first two sentences and the last sentence of a paragraph and ask what it is doing, not what words it contains. The true/false/not given guide and matching headings guide drill both.

A three-week plan

Week 1: one passage a day, timed at 20 minutes, ordered question types first. Log marks by type. Week 2: only matching headings and true/false/not given sets, untimed, checking every answer against the text until the reason for each is clear; then re-time. Week 3: full tests every other day. Expect passage 3 to move first and the total to cross 30 by the end of the week.

Frequently asked questions