[How I Prepared for IELTS 7.0 at 16]

[Reading]
Test, reread, analyze, expand your knowledge.
Four steps that look simple and ordinary, but there's a lot more to them than you'd think!

🖌 Test
While you're doing the test, resist the urge to look up unfamiliar words. The focus is on understanding the overall meaning. Reading tests don't just check how many words you know; they also test whether you can work out the meaning from context when there are some words you don't know.

🔎 Reread
After the test, check your answers, look up the words, and go through the passage and the questions you got wrong again.
(This step fixes the mistakes you made because you didn't know a word)

👩‍🏫 Analyze
I'm sure everyone has run into this: you've looked up all the words but still don't get what a paragraph means, or you can't see how the answer connects to the question. In my case, my blind spot in reading was questions asking whether a point is mentioned in the passage, or whether what's mentioned is true.

The options are True, False and Not given. It's not a traditional true/false question, and the line between False and Not given is often blurry and hard to tell apart. This is when you should ask an expert or study the explanations carefully. Make sure you actually understand it, not just feel like you do after reading the explanation.

🧠 Expand your knowledge
The IELTS Academic test covers many areas: biology, astronomy, business and more can all come up. After each test, it's really important to note down the words and phrases you didn't know and find their synonyms and antonyms. You can even go a step further and learn other common words on that topic.

IELTS uses paraphrasing a lot, so keeping track of synonyms also helps you see how the questions relate to the passage.
Noting down nice sentences and expressions from the passages can also feed your own writing!

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🔎 Study guides you can get now (pinned posts on IG)

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