SKILL 1: BASIC READING IELTS
READING OVERVIEW & PARAPHRASING
The IELTS Reading test is part of the four-module IELTS exam. The 60-minute reading
test features 3 sections with 3 or more passages. While the format and pattern remain
the same for both IELTS General and Academic versions, the question types and
passages featured differ.
1. IELTS Reading Pattern
IELTS Reading assesses different reading skills. The questions are the same for both
Academic and General Training tests, but the passages are different. The Reading
test has three parts, and you get around 60 minutes for 40 questions.
Duration : 60 minutes
Number of Sections : 3 sections, with 3 passages
Number of Questions : 40
Marking : 1 mark for each right answer, no negative marking
✓ The sections get harder as you go, so save time for the tough questions. Try to
limit each section to 20 minutes. You might finish the first part faster and have
extra time for the others.
✓ IELTS Academic reading is split into three sections, typically featuring one
passage each. The timings and number of sections remain the same for both the
IELTS Academic and IELTS General Reading sections.
✓ A number of questions follow each section. There are various question types
featured in the IELTS Academic and General Sections, including
1. Multiple Choice Questions
2. True or False or Not Given
3. Flow Chart Completion
4. Matching Headings
5. Sentence Completion
6. Summary Completion
2. IELTS Academic Reading VS IELTS General Reading
The IELTS exam has two types, and the choice of test depends on your intention of
moving to an English-speaking country. The IELTS Academic is best for university-
level admissions, whereas the IELTS General Training test is good for migration and
admissions for courses that are below degree level.
Adding to this distinction, the IELTS Academic Reading test features academic-level
excerpts from Magazines, Articles, Academic Journals and Textbooks. The texts are
written in different styles, such as descriptive, illustrative, and narrative, supported by
a logical argument.
On the contrary, the IELTS General Reading test passages are sourced from
advertisements, instruction manuals, company guidelines, newspapers, and more.
The passages featured in the IELTS General test are in an increasing difficulty order,
meaning it starts with an easy passage and ends with a slightly complex one.
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IELTS Academic & General Training Reading: Question Types
1. Matching features
2. Table completion
3. Flow-chart completion
4. Identifying information (true, false, not given)
5. Matching headings
6. Matching sentence endings
7. Multiple choice (more than one answer)
8. Multiple choice (one answer)
9. Note completion
10. Sentence completion
11. Summary completion (selecting from a list of words or phrases)
12. Summary completion (selecting words from the text)
3. IELTS Reading Tasks
We’ve explained all the reading question types you’ll encounter in your IELTS
Academic Reading and General Reading tests! Some questions are specific to
Academic and General tests, while others are common in both.
However, you must keep in mind that though some questions are common for
both types of IELTS exam, but the source of passage, complexity and the subject of
discussion will differ.
You must familiarise yourself with common terms used in IELTS Reading preparation.
Here are some.
• Keywords & Paraphrasing: Focus points/words that help you locate important
information within the passage
• Skimming: Reading for gist and to understand the main idea
• Scanning: reading quickly to locate a specific piece of information
• Reading for detail: Reading to understand a logical argument, opinions,
attitudes and the writer’s purpose
Note:
• Read the instructions carefully before you start
• Stick to the given word limit
• Look at the keywords in the questions to help direct you to the right spot in the
article. These words can also be synonyms and paraphrases of the words used
in the questions
• Try skimming and scanning and focus on content words like nouns and verbs
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UNIT I: PARAPHRASING
In the IELTS test, your job is basically to understand the questions and then find the
exact sentences in the passage, which contain the answer accordingly. However, the
words you see in the questions will never be repeated entirely in the passage since
the exam is not meant to test your ability to compare similar words but to test your
English, or to be more precise, your understanding of the language. That’s why the
questions will be paraphrased-said in a different way with the meaning being kept the
same. It is therefore important to understand how paraphrasing is made.
EXAMPLES OF PARAPHRASING
Paraphrasing involves taking a set of facts or opinions and rewording them. When
paraphrasing, it is important to keep the original meaning and to present it in a new
form. Basically, you are simply writing something in your own words that expresses
the original idea.
PARAPHRASING BLOCKS OF TEXT
Paraphrasing can be done with individual sentences or entire paragraphs. There are
several examples of paraphrasing listed below for both long and short blocks of text.
PARAPHRASING SENTENCES
Here are some sentences that have been paraphrased:
➢ Original: Her life spanned years of incredible change for women.
Paraphrase: Mary lived through an era of liberating reform for women.
➢ Original: Giraffes like Acacia leaves and hay and they can consume 75 pounds of
food a day.
Paraphrase: A giraffe can eat up to 75 pounds of Acacia leaves and hay every day.
➢ Original: Any trip to Italy should include a visit to Tuscany to sample their exquisite
wines.
Paraphrase: Be sure to include a Tuscan wine-tasting experience when visiting Italy.
Here is a summary of some of the changes made during the paraphrasing process:
✓ Early in the series = first season
✓ More threatened = greatest threat
✓ Closest friend and associate = one family member
✓ His mother colludes with his uncle = his mother and uncle are conspiring
✓ His kids click through Web sites = his children are surfing the Web
EXAMPLE: 1
Look at the selection of words below and decide which ones are synonyms of the
keyword, to build.
1 compile 7 improve
2 develop 8 institute
3 establish 9 manufacture
4 fabricate 10 produce
5 form 11 strengthen
6 formulate 12 synthesize
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Did you pick all of them? If you did, then you did very well. Remember, however, that
not all synonyms of a particular word can be used in the same context because exact
meanings can vary from word to word and context to context. For instance, you can
hire or rent a car but you can only hire a person (not rent a person). These examples
show the need to continue to develop your vocabulary range as much as possible
through reading.
Passage 1:
Cinnamon is a sweet, fragrant spice produced from the inner bark of trees of the
genus Cinnamomum, which is native to the Indian sub-continent. It was known in
biblical times, and is mentioned in several books of the Bible, both as an ingredient
that was mixed with oils for anointing people’s bodies, and also as a
token indicating friendship among lovers and friends. In ancient Rome,
mourners attending funerals burnt cinnamon to create a pleasant scent. Most often,
however, the spice found its primary use as an additive to food and drink. In the
Middle Ages, Europeans who could afford the spice used it to flavor
food, particularly meat, and to impress those around them with their ability to
purchase an expensive condiment from the ‘exotic’ East. At a banquet, a host would
offer guests a plate with various spices piled upon it as a sign of the wealth at his or
her disposal. Cinnamon was also reported to have health benefits, and was
thought to cure various ailments, such as indigestion.
Practice: 1
Match the words highlighted in black in the text with the synonyms/ paraphrases
below, then check your answers.
1. An indication of how wealthy an individual is
2. A sign of
3. Which originates from
4. States
5. Several
6. Added to
7. Was believed to heal different illnesses
8. Made from
9. Participating in
10. A sweet smell
11. Main
12. Was also said to be beneficial to well being
13. Leave a mark on
14. Especially
Passage 2:
Toward the end of the Middle Ages, the European middle classes began to desire the
lifestyle of the elite, including their consumption of spices. This led to a growth in
demand for cinnamon and other spices. At that time, cinnamon was transported by
Arab merchants, who closely guarded the secret of the source of the spice from
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potential rivals. They took it from India, where it was grown, on camels via an
overland route to the Mediterranean. Their journey ended when
they reached Alexandria. European traders sailed there to purchase their supply of
cinnamon, then brought it back to Venice. The spice then travelled from that great
trading city to markets all around Europe. Because the overland trade route allowed
for only small quantities of the spice to reach Europe, and because Venice had a
virtual monopoly of the trade, the Venetians could set the price of cinnamon
exorbitantly high. These prices, coupled with the increasing demand, spurred the
search for new routes to Asia by Europeans eager to take part in the spice trade.
Practice: 2
Match the words highlighted in black in the text with the synonyms/ paraphrases
below, then check your answers.
1. Keen to get involved in
2. Together with
3. Through
4. Amounts
5. Kept it under wraps
6. Set an excessively high cost
7. Competitors
8. Arrived at
9. The way of living
10. Prompted them to look for
11. This resulted in an increased need for
12. Cartel
13. Buy their stock of
Passage 3:
More than 200 cannary birds are being phased out of Britain’s mining pits, according
to new plans by the government. Modern technology is being favoured over long-
serving yellow feathered friend of the miner in detecting harmful gases which may be
present underground.
New electronic detectors will replace the bird because they are said to be cheaper in
the long run and more effective in indicating the presence of pollutants in the air
otherwise unnoticed by miners. The gas detectors will be hand-held and carry a digital
reading which appears on a screen alerting miners to the text of the gases.
Practice 3:
Choose a word or words from the passage above which are synonyms for the
words below.
1. Preferred
2. Gradually stop using
3. Substitute
4. Employed since way back
5. Existence
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6. Portable
7. Bird (canary)
8. Ultimately
Passage 4:
Aviation is a (1) stubbornly difficult strand of transport to decarbonise. Aircraft burn
huge amounts of fossil fuel, for business travel, leisure activities and tourism that used
to be (2) prohibitively expensive but in recent decades have become accessible to
large populations as fossil fuels became cheaper (3) in real terms.
Demand management aside – and that too is on the table, of course, alongside that
Swedish phrase flygskam, or ‘flight shame’ – very few (4) industry observers truly
think that batteries will make the sort of gains in energy density to ever be capable of
displacing liquid fuels for (5) aviation applications. Hence, the question arises
whether sustainable replacements for fossil liquid fuels can be developed and then
made in (6) sufficient quantities.
Practice 4:
Match the numbered phrases with their rewritten versions below. Each answer
is used only once.
1. In the absolute sense
2. Use in the field of aviation
3. Persistently challenging
4. Too costly to be possible
5. Large-enough amounts
6. People who follow the aviation business
Passage 5:
What did the Romans ever do for us? It seems they added an inch to the average
height of their British subjects — they came, they saw, we prospered. And after taking
a plunge during the Anglo-Saxon era, the height of the average inhabitant rose again
in the wake of the Norman Conquest. These are just two of the findings of new
research using data from skeletal remains to calculate how the average height of men
rose or fell over 2,000 years of history in what is now England. The result is (1) a
startling picture of changes in health and wellbeing.
Using data of skeletal remains of men aged between 21 and 49 years from a range of
archaeological excavations across England, they deduced (2) individuals’ full
heights from their femur length. Lead author Dr Gregori Galofré-Vila, from the
Department of Sociology at the University of Oxford, said: ‘We believe our results shed
new light on the development of health in England over the very long run.’
He and his team worked on the basis that height, linked with childhood nutrition,
is (3) a good measure of wellbeing and can be estimated accurately from the length
of a full grown man’s femur. Biologists and epidemiologists have long recognised that
although (4) the main causes of variation in individual height may be genetic,
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changes in the economic, social and environmental circumstances are reflected in the
mean heights of different groups of people at any given time.
The working paper reveals that men in this area of Britain became taller when it was
under Roman occupation (200–410AD), with average height rising from 167cm (5ft
6in) to 170cm (5ft 7in). The researchers suggest this rise in average height (5)
coincided with the Romans’ improved water supply and sanitation systems and a
more varied diet. Heights did not decline immediately after the Romans left Britain in
410, but fell from 600AD. The paper (6) highlights previous research suggesting
that health (7) may have deteriorated when populations moved out of the towns and
cities set up by the Romans, abandoning the more hygienic water supplies and waste-
disposal systems. Plague and pestilence then became common and infectious
diseases were on the increase, with archaeological evidence also suggesting that (8)
diets were inadequate, notes the paper.
Practice 5:
Match the numbered phrases with their rewritten versions below. Each answer
is used only once.
1. Food did not provide sufficient nutrients
2. Might have become worse
3. Occurred at the same time as
4. A surprising image
5. The primary reasons for differences
6. Calls attention to earlier studies
7. How tall people grew to be
8. A reliable assessment
Passage 6:
Crime scene investigators are about to get an assist from the land of the pharaohs.
New research has shown that a pigment called Egyptian blue, formulated some 5,250
years ago, can be used as dusting powder to detect fingerprints on complicated
surfaces.
The earliest known synthetic pigment, Egyptian blue is found in some of the paint that
still colors ancient statues, coffins, and tomb walls. Modern scientists were intrigued
by this long-lasting tint and figured out its chemical components decades ago. More
recently they discovered that it emits near-infrared radiation when exposed to a certain
kind of light.
Practice 6:
Below the summary of the passage above. Fill in the gaps using the words list
given below. Make sure the summary is grammatically correct when you insert
the word.
The pigment (1) ………. Egyptian blue, which was formulated (2) ………. 5,250 years
ago, can now be used to (3) ………. finger prints on complicated surfaces. This
pigment was used in the painting of statues and tomb wall reliefs in Ancient Egypt.
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However, it has now been (4) ………. that, when it is exposed to a (5) ………. light, it
emits near-infrared radiation.
Word List:
Choose words to fill in the gaps above. The meaning should be the same as the
original paragraph
Make / identify / observe / revealed / about / names / found / using / creates / known
as / particular / over
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