Why the last passage costs the most
Reading is three passages and forty questions in sixty minutes, and the failure is almost always the same shape: a candidate is on pace through passage one, loses ten minutes on passage two, and arrives at passage three with twelve minutes and thirteen questions.
Those thirteen questions are not partial credit. They are zero. And they are frequently the easier half of passage three, because the questions that come first in a passage are usually the simpler ones.
The fix is not reading faster. It is deciding in advance what you will give up when you fall behind, because a candidate who does not decide in advance will spend the last twelve minutes deciding instead of answering.
A workable split
| Passage | Skim | Answer | Total |
|---|---|---|---|
| One | 2-3 min | 17-18 min | 20 min |
| Two | 2-3 min | 17-18 min | 20 min |
| Three | 3 min | 14 min | 17 min |
| Review | 3 min | 3 min |
That leaves a small buffer, which is deliberate. A plan with no buffer fails on the day it is needed.
The ordering assumption is that passage one is the easiest and passage three the hardest. That usually holds on Academic, and it is the right default. But treat it as a default and not a law: if a passage turns out to be unusually hard, the plan tells you what to give up, which is the real value of having one.
Give up the right things, in the right order
When you are behind, this is the order to abandon questions. It runs from most to least costly.
- Matching headings you have not narrowed down. These look answerable and often are not, and reading four paragraphs to rule options out can take four minutes.
- A single missing answer after two attempts. Mark it and move. There is no negative marking, so a blank and a wrong answer score the same, and you have not spent the time to change that.
- Summary completion with no clear grammar cue. Harder than it looks when you are lost.
- Multiple choice where the options are long. These are disproportionately expensive per mark.
Never give up the sentence completion questions with a predictable grammar pattern. Those are the cheapest marks on the paper and abandoning them is the most expensive mistake available.
Reading faster, honestly
Three techniques, in order of usefulness.
Stop subvocalising. Saying the words while you read ties you to speech speed. Using your finger or a pencil as a guide and moving it faster than you can speak forces your eyes ahead and your comprehension catches up within a few paragraphs.
Read in chunks. Three or four words at a time rather than one.
*Word by word:* The / government / has / decided / to / implement / new / policies
*In chunks:* The government / has decided to / implement new policies
Read for the question, not the passage. You are not reading to understand everything. You are reading to find specific information, which means content words carry the meaning and function words can go. "The government has decided to implement new policies regarding education" can be skimmed as *government, decided, new policies, education*.
A different approach per question type
Multiple choice. Read the question and the options before the passage, not after. You then read looking for three specific things, which is far faster than reading for general meaning and then hunting.
True/False/Not Given. Read the statement first, then find the line that settles it. The evidence test decides these quickly once you know where to look.
Matching headings. Read the headings and the first sentence of each paragraph. Often the answer is visible from the topic sentence alone.
Summary completion. Read the summary first. The gaps tell you the grammar and the type, which is often most of the answer.
Sentence completion. Same, plus the position of the gap tells you which part of the sentence you need, and sometimes the whole word.
The single most useful habit across all of them: read the question before the passage, always. Candidates read all three passages and then start the questions, which is reading for pleasure, not for information.
The transfer of attention problem
The real difficulty is not any individual technique. It is that Reading asks you to hold a task and a text at the same time, and the task is what people drop when the text gets hard.
Every technique above is really an attempt to move the task out of your head and onto the page. Predicting the answer type. Reading options first. Marking a question you are abandoning. Each of those externalises a decision so that reading badly for two minutes does not also cost you the decision.
What the review time is for
Three minutes at the end, used on two things.
Blanks. No negative marking, so every blank is a free mark you left behind.
Transferred answers. A question answered correctly but written in the wrong blank scores zero. This is one of the most avoidable losses in the whole test.
Do not use the time to reconsider answers. A confident answer is usually right, and doubt at the end is how correct answers get lost.
Building the habit
The timing does not come from reading faster. It comes from having done enough passages under a timer that the plan is automatic.
- Do single passages with a timer for the first two weeks, one passage per session, using the twenty-minute budget.
- Then full sixty-minute tests, checking afterwards not only how many you answered but how much time each passage actually took.
- The interesting number is the passage where you consistently overrun, because that is where your method does not yet match your plan.
Most candidates find the overrun is passage two, and that the cause is multiple choice rather than comprehension.
Practise on a computer, because the real test is computer-delivered and the on-screen task list needs tracking while you read. The IELTS Practice Portal runs timed Reading with a band calculator so the cost of running out of time is visible rather than theoretical.
🎯 Practice What You Learned
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