The golden rule to improve your reading skills, if you are preparing for IELTS is to read articles in English, Magazines, Newspapers, travel brochures, Wikipedia and encyclopedia, etc. If you read regularly in English, you will develop a skill set that will help you improve your English reading skills.

• You should always develop the habit of reading faster by reading sentences rather than reading word by word. You should develop a habit of reading at least 2 hours per day. You can pick any subject of your choice, whether it is beauty, health or finance related news. You can pick magazines, health journals, newspapers, books and travel brochures, etc.

• You should not forget that you are reading for a purpose and not for leisure. You should always develop a habit of looking at the heading, text, sentence structure while you are reading. You should also pay special attention to the bold, italics and underlined words. Try to understand what the question exactly wants and how to prepare an answer for it. You should pay attention to the instructions while you are reading the passages.

• Though skimming and scanning is a greatly useful, but you need to know the tricks so that you can do it correctly. You will require little practice and patience to skill the art. While you are scanning, your focus should not be on skipping the relevant information, but getting to the chore of the passage without skipping any relevant information.

• When you have read the question, there is always a logical place for every question where you can begin searching for an answer. To start searching for an answer, you need to develop understanding of the main idea or topic. You can save a great amount of time if you want to work on the main idea or topic of each paragraph. IELTS reading section generally have 10 types of questions, which are:

• Multiple Choice Questions

• Short-answer questions

• Sentence completion

• Notes/ summary flow-chart/diagram completion

• Yes, no, not given or True, false, not given

• Classification

• Matching lists/phrases

• Choosing headings for paragraphs/sections of a text

• Scanning and identifying location of information

• Labeling a diagram

Multiple Choice Questions

To prepare your skills for multiple choice questions, you would require reading the instructions carefully. To attempt these questions, you can underline the relevant keywords to get an idea of the topic that you are reading. You can also look at the illustrations or diagrams to understand what is being discussed in the text. You can get back to the questions if required. If you are not able to look for specific information, you can refer to the information that you have underlined so that your time does not get wasted.

Short Answer Questions

For the short answer questions, you are not supposed to write your answers more than three words. You can write your answer in one word, two words but not more than three words. To answer the questions correctly, you can underline the keywords and then decide what type of information you need to find in the text. You can go back to the question and decide what part of the text you need to read.

Sentence Completion

For this, you will require completing the end of the sentence. The questions that appear in the passage generally appear in the same order as the information given in the text. For this also, you can underline the main keywords and work out for the information which is being asked. Similarly, for the other types of questions, you will be following the same tips.

Enjoy!