General IELTS Reading Skills

The General IELTS Reading test tests your ability to read, understand and answer questions of a variety of types and at a reasonably educated level.

Both discourse level reading skills (skills needed to understand the main ideas of a text) and sentence level reading skills (skills needed to locate and interpret detailed information in the text) are tested.

You can also expect to see questions concerning your understanding of opinion and attitude. What's more, you'll need to be able to distinguish these from fact.

General IELTS reading vs. specific IELTS test practice

We've reached the stage in education where most students only want to know -- what's on the test -- and nothing else. While it is important to become familiar with the test, improving reading skills in general will greatly improve your chances for success on the IELTS reading test.

In other words, practicing the IELTS test alone may not actually result in the improvement of your overall reading skills. This could be very costly come exam time.

What should you read?

Suitable materials to improve your general IELTS reading should include a variety of the following seeing that some IELTS test material will resemble the following list of materials.

• leaflets

• brochures

• advertisements

• college prospectuses

• book extracts

• newspapers

• feature articles (general interest) from newspapers 

• general interest magazines

• journals

• the Internet

• coursebook texts

For more information plus practice for your general IELTS reading click on the preceding link.