Getting Band 8 in IELTS reading is a difficult task but not impossible. For achieving 8 Band, you must concentrate a lot and have a prior sound strategy in your mind that could be implemented well on the day of your IELTS exam. If you are giving IELTS Academic exam, you must score 35 out of 40 to achieve Band 8 score which means you can afford to do hardly 5 mistakes in your exam. On the other hand, you must score 37 out of 40 for achieving a band score of 8 in IELTS General Training which implies you can only make 3 mistakes in your exam. IELTS candidates who were successful in receiving Band 9 have given some extremely useful tips that can help you get high band score in IELTS reading. Let us discuss what these top secrets of Band 8 are:
Solving Questions Simultaneously While Reading Passage
The foremost thing that you as an IELTS candidate must be aware of is that you get your answers from the passage in the order of questions. For example, answer to question 1 in paragraph 2, answer to question 2 in paragraph 4 and so on. In this example case, you would never get answer to question 2 before the statement in paragraph 2 where you had received answer for question 1. For this reason, you can adopt an excellent strategy that works really well in IELTS reading and which is nothing but solving the questions side by side while you are reading the passage.
For instance, first read question 1 and then start reading the passage to find its answer. Once you get answer for this question, go to question 2 and again start reading the passage from where you had stopped. In this manner, you would not be required to waste your time in reading the whole passage and you would be quickly finding out answers in no time. By doing this, you would never complain to be out of time while solving the questions in IELTS reading exam.
Marking Answers in the Reading Passage
One of the effective strategies given by a candidate, who appeared in IELTS exam and received Band 9, is that you can mark answers in your reading passage rather than writing them first on the question paper and then transferring in your sheet which would consume double the time unnecessarily. Not only minutes but even seconds can be costly enough for losing out a particular question. Hence if you save some time, you are able to devote that saved time in solving a new question.
Now, you cannot mark answers in reading passage for all the questions. Short answers, summary completion, flow chart, diagram labelling, fill-ups etc. are the questions where you can use this strategy. Basically, the questions where you are to write words, you can mark them in the passage itself and then transfer these answers quickly after you solve one passage rather than first writing the answers alongside the question and then transferring in your answer sheet. This will certainly save your time and help you get good score in IELTS reading.
Comments: