IELTS Reading: 40 questions, 60 minutes, and a plan for both

Reading gives you no transfer time, no negative marking, and no chance to read three passages “properly” in an hour. This guide covers the timing split that beats 20/20/20, every question type with its trap named, both band conversion tables, and exactly where seven more right answers come from.

The format: 60 minutes, 40 questions, no mercy at the end

IELTS Reading gives you 60 minutes, three passages, and 40 questions. Here is the detail that decides more bands than any technique: there is no transfer time. Listening gives paper-based candidates 10 extra minutes to move answers to the answer sheet; Reading gives you nothing. When the hour ends, whatever is not on your answer sheet does not exist.

Academic and General Training differ in this module, and only partly in the way people assume:

• Academic: three long passages from journals, magazines and books — dense, abstract, roughly equal in length, getting harder as you go.
• General Training: sections 1 and 2 use shorter everyday texts — notices, advertisements, workplace documents, timetables — and section 3 has one long passage close to Academic level.
• The catch: GT texts are easier, so the band conversion is harder. A raw score of 30/40 is Band 7.0 on Academic but only 6.0 on GT. “GT Reading is easier” is only half true, and the half that is false costs people their visa scores.

Raw score to band: both conversion tables

Every question is worth one mark, and your raw score out of 40 converts to a band. The tables below are approximate — the exact boundaries shift slightly between test versions — but they are close enough to plan with.

Read the GT column honestly before you plan. For Band 7.0, an Academic candidate can drop ten questions; a GT candidate can drop five or six. If you need GT 7.0 for immigration, you are effectively sitting a near-perfect-accuracy test.

Timing: 17/20/23, not 20/20/20

Splitting the hour evenly sounds sensible and loses marks. On Academic, passage 3 is the hardest and its questions take the longest; on GT, section 3 is the only genuinely long text. Give the last passage the biggest share: roughly 17 minutes, then 20, then 23 — and take your section-1 savings with you instead of polishing easy answers.

Accept one uncomfortable truth early: you never have time to “read properly”. Forty questions on three dense texts in an hour is not a reading-comprehension exercise at natural pace — it is a search task. The method that survives the clock is: skim the passage once for structure (what each paragraph is about, 2–3 minutes, no highlighting every line), then work from the questions and locate the sentence each one lives in. You read intensively only where an answer is hiding.

Every question type, with the trap named

You will meet most of these on test day. Each rewards a slightly different move — and each has a signature way of taking marks off people.

True / False / Not Given — and Yes / No / Not Given

T/F/NG asks about facts in the text; Y/N/NG asks about the writer’s views or claims in opinion pieces. The logic is identical, and so is the trap: NOT GIVEN means the text does not say — not “probably true”. FALSE (or NO) means the text contradicts the statement. If you find yourself reasoning “well, it’s likely…”, you have left the text and the answer is NOT GIVEN.

Matching headings

Match a heading to each paragraph — the paragraph’s main idea, not its first sentence. Writers bury topic sentences mid-paragraph, and the heading list always includes decoys that match one detail rather than the point. If headings are your weak type, do them last: after answering the other questions you know the passage, and half the headings place themselves.

Matching information & matching features

Matching information asks which paragraph contains a detail (“a reference to the cost of early experiments”) — answers are NOT in passage order, and a paragraph can be used twice or not at all. Matching features ties statements to a list — researchers to findings, dates to events. Scan for the names first and circle them; names and dates are the only things in the passage that cannot be paraphrased.

Sentence, summary, note & table completion

Fill gaps with words from the passage, under a stated word limit. Sentence completion answers come in passage order — a real gift for locating. Summary completion may offer a word box (easier — it is elimination) or not (the answer must be lifted exactly, spelling included). Whatever fits the gap must also fit grammatically: if the gap needs a plural noun and your candidate word is a verb, you are in the wrong sentence.

Multiple choice

Eliminate, don’t hunt. Three of the four options are wrong in findable ways — half-true, too extreme, or true-but-not-what-was-asked. Locate the relevant stretch of text, then kill options against it. Hunting for the right answer first makes you vulnerable to the half-true one, which was written specifically for you.

Short answer & diagram labelling

Short answer: answer a question in a set number of words from the text — copy exactly, and count the words. Diagram labelling: match labels to a picture, usually of a process or mechanism; the answers cluster in one or two paragraphs, so find the description first, then label everything from it.

The one skill under every question: paraphrase spotting

The test almost never repeats the question’s wording in the passage — if it did, Reading would be a matching game for anyone with an alphabet. Every question type above is really testing whether you can hear “children’s ability to concentrate” and find “young people’s capacity to sustain attention”.

The mistakes that cost real bands

• Spending 25 minutes on passage 1. The classic collapse: comfortable start, careful reading, and then passage 3 — the hardest — gets 15 panicked minutes. The 17/20/23 budget exists to prevent exactly this. Wear a watch or use the on-screen timer; check it at each passage boundary, not each question.
• Answering from your own knowledge. You know the fact is true in the real world, so you write TRUE. The text never said it: NOT GIVEN. This single habit accounts for a huge share of T/F/NG errors, and clever, well-read candidates make it more, not less.
• Leaving blanks. There is no negative marking. A blank scores zero with certainty; a guess scores better than zero on average. In the last minute, fill every gap — for T/F/NG questions you are one lucky letter from a free mark. Never leave a blank.
• Word-limit violations. “NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS” means a correct three-word answer is marked wrong. Hyphenated words count as one; numbers written as figures count as a number. Count on your fingers if you must — this is the cheapest mark-loss on the paper.
• Treating NOT GIVEN as “probably true”. Named above, repeated here because it is that common: the moment your justification starts with “it makes sense that…”, stop. Evidence or NOT GIVEN.

A practice method that compounds

Grinding full tests every day measures your level; it does not change it. This loop does, at one passage a day plus one full test a week:

1. One passage a day, graded. A single passage with its 13–14 questions, marked immediately. Small enough to review properly, frequent enough to build the paraphrase dictionary.
2. Keep an error log by question type. For each wrong answer, record: the type, the question wording, the passage wording, and why you fell. Two weeks of this shows you a pattern no teacher could see faster — most people find one or two types carrying 70% of their losses.
3. Accuracy weeks before timed weeks. If you are scoring below about 30/40 untimed, the clock is not your problem — comprehension is. Practise untimed until accuracy stabilises, then reintroduce the 17/20/23 budget and train speed on a skill that exists.
4. One full test weekly, exam conditions. All three passages, 60 minutes, answers on a separate sheet if you are taking paper-based — transferring as you go needs rehearsing too, because there is no transfer time to fix it later.

From 6.0 to 7.0: seven more right answers

On Academic, Band 6.0 starts at 23/40 and Band 7.0 at 30/40 — so the jump is, concretely, about seven more correct answers. Not a new reading brain; seven questions. Plan where they come from:

• Two to three from T/F/NG discipline. Applying the evidence-or-NOT-GIVEN rule mechanically converts the “probably true” errors almost immediately — the fastest marks on this list.
• Two from completion types. Sentence and summary completion are locate-and-copy tasks with in-order answers; with a trained paraphrase eye and strict word-limit counting, they should approach 100% for a Band 7 candidate.
• Two from the clock. Most 6.0 scripts show a rushed or abandoned final passage. The 17/20/23 split plus the 90-second rule typically rescues the two easy marks currently dying at question 38.
• Headings last, always. Matching headings resists quick gains — park it at the end of each passage rather than spending your improvements budget on the stingiest type.