Many tricks in IELTS Reading are dream-shattering, heart-breaking, and confidence-damaging. They are “tricks” because they trick you into having wrong answers or no answers at all. Because of that, you won’t get the band score you need, and your goal isn’t met.
In my 10 years of training people for the IELTS exam, I’ve encountered a great number of tricks in IELTS Reading, but the ones I’m sharing in this post are among the most common ones.
In this article, I will share with you two of the most common tricks in IELTS Reading and how to avoid falling for them.
Understanding the common tricks is what helped hundreds of my clients, like Donna from South Africa, achieve their IELTS target band scores.
These tricks are also included and explained in detail in my Everything IELTS – The Comprehensive Guide to IELTS which is exclusively curated and FREE to all members of the Everything IELTS packages.
Trick 1: Reversed orders
This trick is very popular in Fill in the Gaps.
How many words for “fill in the gaps” questions in IELTS Reading?
Take a look at this question below.
The answer to this question can be found in the following line. Take a moment here to find the answer to Question 3 above.
The answer is “workshops”.
And this is where the trick happens. In the Question, “home” is mentioned first, then the blank, which can be answered with “workshops”. But in the text, “workshops” appears first, then “home”. The orders of the words in the text and in the quest are reversed.
If you keep on looking for the word “home” or its synonyms, you may skip the word “workshops” that comes before the word “home”, hence you may not be able to answer the question or you will have to read the text again to find the answer.
Don’t undermine this trick just because the question in the example is simple. Sometimes, the question is long and complicated, so it will be trickier for you to find the answer.
Trick 2: True or Not Given
Take a look at this question.
In this question, I want you to read very carefully. You can re-read it several times, focusing on “so that”. When analyzing this statement, you should understand that according to this statement, Britain’s canal network grew fast IN ORDER TO transport more goods around the country. In other words, the PURPOSE of developing this network to transport more goods.
Now, let’s look at the paragraph below and try to figure out the answer to this T/F/NG question. The highlighted line seems to contain the information related to this question.
The answer is: NOT GIVEN.
If you answered “TRUE”, you have fallen for this trick. The statement in question is NOT FALSE and some of the information is also mentioned in the text (“boats and ships were widely used to carry goods along Britain’s canals”).
However, in True/False/Not Given, sometimes, you will find statements that are not false so you think they must be “true”. This is why you get tricked. There are three options for you to choose. Something that is not false doesn’t necessarily mean it is true.
The statement in question implies that the system was developed to transport more goods. But you don’t find the information in this text saying that “transport more goods” was the purpose of this development. On top of that, you can notice the phrase “in addition” at the beginning of the highlighted line, which means transporting more goods was an addition to something else.
In short, a “NOT GIVEN” statement can either be (1) 100% nonexistent in the text (AKA you can’t find all the information in the text) or (2) partially nonexistent but the rest is true (AKA you can find some information that is the same as the statement but can’t find other information in the text).
The statement in question falls into case number 2.
How to avoid tricks in IELTS Reading?
To avoid these tricks or any others, you must first understand the tricks and how they are tricking you, then use their own strategies to defeat them.
About the two tricks mentioned in this article, the best way to avoid them is to ignore the keywords and focus on the meaning of the questions/statements.
In trick 1 (reversed orders), this is a fill-in-the-gap question, in which you need to find a keyword from the text to fill the question. And if you ignore the keyword “home” in the sentence and focus on finding “a place where people worked”, you will find the information entirely in that one sentence and will not miss the word “workshops”.
In trick 2 (yes or not given), this is a T/F/NG question, you need to know what statement can be classified as true/false/not given. And if you ignore all the keywords in the statement and focus on finding out if “transporting more goods was the reason Britain’s canal system was developed”, you will not misunderstand this statement.
Have you ever fallen for these tricks? Do you even know that you have fallen for these tricks?
Let me know in a comment.
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[…] Moreover, it is important to remember that there are a lot of tricks in IELTS Reading and many of them appear in True/False/Not Given. One of the most common tricks is explained in this post 👉 Get 9.0 by avoiding these tricks in IELTS Reading. […]