Instead, you should be looking for words that mean the same thing i.e. Instead be aware that you are looking for meaning not words.Īs you have probably already guessed from the passage above, the main problem is students trying to match words in the question with exactly the same words in the reading text. As you can see, paraphrasing and synonyms are used in many of the questions and if you were looking for words that exactly match those in the text you wouldn’t find them.
The table below shows just some examples from an IELTS reading paper.
Understand it and suddenly your world becomes brighter. Therefore if you don’t understand this, it is like walking in the dark with no lights. The people who write the tests take a piece of writing and they then use paraphrasing and synonyms to make many of the questions. We have to understand how Cambridge actually make the IELTS reading tests in order to be successful. I have used mostly synonyms to do this, i.e. The majority of males use automobiles to get to their jobs.Īs you can see, both sentences mean exactly the same thing but I have used different words. Paraphrasing is simply rephrasing or saying the sentence again, so that it has the same meaning, but with different words. In order to do well on the IELTS reading test, you have to understand what paraphrasing and synonyms are because Cambridge use them so much in the reading and listening tests and expect you to use them in the writing and speaking tests. To access more example reading questions for both the academic and general papers visit the test sample page. The word limit and whether we should use words from the text or not can change from question to question so read them carefully. This means that we can’t change the words from the text. If we write any more than this, we get the question wrong.Īlso, note that it says ‘from the text’. This means that we can write one or two words only. Note that it says NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the text for each answer. Source: Cambridge English IELTS Past Papers.Īs you can see there are three incomplete sentences that we must complete. provide you with a strategy to use on exam day.look at example sentence completion questions.These questions are as much vocabulary tests as they are reading tests because they require you to be aware of paraphrasing (using different words to repeat a sentence so that it has the same meaning) and synonyms (words with the same or very similar meanings). In sentence completion question types, you will be given a number of sentences with gaps in them and asked to complete the sentences with words from the reading text.
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