Ielts course

5 Intensive reading or reading for detail means careful study of a text or part of a text. We do this when all the content is important. For instance, if you bought a new computer and you wanted to know how it worked, you would need to read the instructions carefully.
We also read a text intensively when we need to understand exactly what the writer means, or to find out more details. For instance, having skimmed a film review for a general idea of what it’s about, you might read the review again, this time intensively, to find out details of the plot.
Intensive reading is an important skill because we often have to read things very carefully to understand exactly what the writer is saying.
6 Guessing words from context. A good reader will sometimes be able to work out the meaning of a word by using the context provided by the text and their knowledge of the world, rather than having to look the word up in a dictionary. For instance, if you were reading a car manual and you came across a part of the engine you didn’t know, you might be able to work out what it is from the description of what it does.
Guessing words from context is not always easy for learners, but it is an important skill that can sometimes help us to understand a text even if it contains unknown words.
7 Understanding opinion and attitude means understanding what the writer is thinking or feeling, even when this is not directly stated. For instance, if someone on holiday wrote in an email, ‘I wish didn’t have to leave tomorrow,’ you would understand that the person was having a good time.
Understanding attitude and opinion is an important reading skill because writers often do not state directly what they are thinking or feeling.
Tasks in the reading test

Here are the different types of questions:

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  Task type 1 – Multiple choice
  
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  Task type 2 – Identifying information
  
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  Task type 3 – Identifying writer’s views/claim
  
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  Task type 4 – Matching information
  
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  Task type 5 – Matching headings
  

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  Task type 6 – Matching features
  
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  Task type 7 – Matching sentence endings
  
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  Task type 8 – Sentence completion
  
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  Task type 9 – Summary, note, table, flow-chart completion
  
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  Task type 10 – Diagram label completion
  
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  Task type 11 – Short-answer questions