IELTS Reading Strategy — Timing and True/False/Not Given

Read it all and you lose

IELTS Reading is 60 minutes, 3 passages, 40 questions. Read every sentence start to finish and you will run out of time. The skill isn't reading — it's finding. The passage is a warehouse you go into to fetch answers, not a novel to savour.

20 minutes a passage, and the "one-minute rule"

• Budget 20 minutes per passage.
• Never spend more than a minute on one question. Mark it, move on, come back.
• Academic gives you no extra time to transfer answers — write them straight onto the answer sheet as you go. People who don't know this lose minutes copying at the end.

Flip the order — questions first

For most question types I tell students to read the questions before the passage. You can only scan well if you know what you're hunting for. Nail two skills:

• Skimming — titles and first sentences, just to get the shape of the passage
• Scanning — hunting the question's keywords (names, years, capitalised words) in the text

True / False / Not Given — this is where bands are decided

This is the type Korean students get wrong most, and almost always at the same spot: telling False apart from Not Given.

Get the definitions exact:

• True — the passage confirms the statement.
• False — the passage contradicts it (there's opposing information).
• Not Given — the passage says nothing about it. There's no basis to judge.

Here's the trap. When people can't find the answer, they guess False. But "can't find it" isn't False — it's Not Given. False requires an actual contradicting sentence in the text.

Say the statement is "The museum is the oldest in the country," and the passage only says "The museum opened in 1902." Nothing says it's the oldest, and nothing says it isn't. You'll want to fill the gap with common sense — don't. It's Not Given.

How I teach T/F/NG

I give students one rule: to answer False, find the contradicting sentence in the text and underline it with your finger. If you can't find a sentence to underline, it isn't False — it's Not Given. That rule alone lifts accuracy fast.

And Not Given statements are usually designed to sound plausible — sensible things that just aren't in the passage. The moment you fill them in with what you already know, you're wrong. Judge only by what's on the page, not your background knowledge.

Not Given means "not in the text," not "wrong." Remember that one line and you're halfway there.

The rest, quickly

• Matching Headings — focus on the first and last sentence of each paragraph. It's asking for the paragraph's theme, not its details.
• Gap-fill / summary completion — check the word limit first, predict the part of speech that fits the blank, then scan for it.

One misspelling costs a mark

Reading answers are often lifted straight from the passage — but a wrong spelling or a missing plural -s is marked wrong. Losing a question you actually knew to a spelling slip is the most painful way to drop points. Copy the word from the text exactly.