Ielts reading test Part 2

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IELTS reading test
Part 2
Aims:

• 
  to help learners develop previewing and predicting skills
  
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  to help learners read for main ideas (skimming)
  
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  to introduce learners to the Matching headings task
  

Scanning for specific information

One problem that some learners have when approaching reading texts is that they try to understand every word. As you only have 60 minutes in the IELTS Reading test to read over 2,000 words, you won’t be able to do this. 

You looked at how using skimming skills enables the reader to read a text very quickly for the main ideas. Now you are going to look at another way of reading the text quickly, which involves using scanning skills (reading quickly through a text for specific information). Success in many of the IELTS Reading questions will depend on the candidates’ ability to do this.

You also saw that the way we read a text will often depend on the type of text and our reason for reading it. For instance, imagine that you wanted to go horse riding and you had never ridden a horse before. If you were looking at an advertisement for a riding school, you would particularly want to see if there were lessons for people with no riding experience. So you would read the text quickly to find this specific information – that is, you would use scanning skills.

Matching features: Approaching the task

One of the task types which involves scanning the text for specific information in both the Academic and the General Training Reading tests is the Matching features task. In this task type, candidates are required to match a set of statements or pieces of information to a list of options. The options are a group of features from the text and are identified by letters. There are more options than statements.
Let’s have a look at an example of a question from the Academic test. In this example, the following maps are the options to match to the set of statements:

• 
  maps of Utopia
  
• 
  Charles Booth’s maps of London
  
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  map commissioned by Nicholas Philpot Leader
  
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  map of Bath area
  
• 
  early modern Chinese maps
  
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  map of the Antarctic
  
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  plan of Ostia harbour
  
• 
  Hereford World Map
  

The best strategy for approaching this task type is to start by skimming the whole text very quickly to get an idea of the content and then to scan the text for the things in the list of options.