I never finish the IELTS reading section. Should I read the passages faster?

No — you should read them less. Candidates run out of time because they read each passage thoroughly before looking at the questions, which is the natural thing to do and the wrong order.

Read the questions first

The passages are long and most of what is in them is never asked about. Reading the whole thing carefully means spending most of your time on material that carries no marks.

The order that works:

1. Skim the passage for about a minute — headings, first sentence of each paragraph, anything in bold or italics. You want the shape, not the content.
2. Read the questions.
3. Go back and read only the parts that answer them.

You will finish the section having read perhaps half of each passage properly, and that is correct.

Questions usually follow the passage order

Most question types are sequential: the answer to question 4 comes after the answer to question 3 in the text. That means you never need to search the whole passage — you only need to search forward from where you found the last one.

This single fact halves the searching. The exceptions are the question types that explicitly jumble the order, such as matching headings to paragraphs, and those are recognisable from the instruction.

Scan for the distinctive word

Pick the most searchable word in the question — a name, a date, a number, a technical term, something capitalised — and scan for that rather than reading.

Avoid scanning for common words. If the question asks about "the increase in production", scanning for "production" will hit it fifteen times. Scanning for the specific figure or the researcher's name lands you in one place.

Be ready for the answer to be paraphrased. The passage rarely repeats the question's wording — that is the point of the test — so scan for the unpara- phraseable thing, which is usually a proper noun or a number.

True / False / Not Given

Where most marks are lost, and the distinction is narrower than people assume.

• True — the passage states it, possibly in different words
• False — the passage states the opposite
• Not Given — the passage does not say either way

The error is choosing False when the answer is Not Given. False requires the passage to contradict the statement. If the passage is simply silent, or only partly addresses it, the answer is Not Given.

Ask yourself: can I point to the sentence that makes this wrong? If you cannot, it is Not Given, however implausible the statement seems in general. What you know about the world is irrelevant; only the passage counts.

Timing discipline

Three passages, and they usually get harder. Give yourself a fixed allowance per passage and move on when it is used, even with questions unanswered.

Candidates who let passage one overrun lose easy marks in passage three. A question you had time to attempt and guessed is worth more than a question you never reached, and there is no penalty for a wrong answer — so fill in every box before the end regardless.