Time management in the Reading test

A minute-by-minute plan for the 60-minute IELTS Reading test, with rules for when to guess, when to move on and how to train your pace.

Ask candidates why they did not get the Reading score they wanted, and the commonest answer is ‘I ran out of time’. Yet the same candidates, given unlimited time, often score two bands higher. Their English is good enough. What they lack is a plan. This lesson gives you one.

The arithmetic

• 60 minutes, 40 questions → 90 seconds per question, including all reading.
• Three passages of about 850 words. Reading one of them carefully from start to finish takes five to six minutes. Do that three times and a third of the test has gone before you answer anything.

The conclusion is unavoidable: you cannot read everything carefully. You must skim for structure and read closely only where the questions send you (Lesson 2).

A plan that works

Passage 1 is normally the easiest, so that is where you save time; Passage 3 is the hardest, so that is where you spend it. If at the 43-minute mark you are still on Passage 1, stop, guess the remaining answers, flag them and move on. This feels uncomfortable, but it is correct: the questions you have not yet seen in Passage 2 include easy marks, and you will never reach them if you stay.

On the computer-delivered test there is no transfer time, but there is also no transferring to do. The clock is always visible, and you can jump between passages using the navigation bar at the bottom of the screen.

The 90-second rule

For any single question:

1. Find the place and read closely.
2. If the answer is clear, enter it.
3. If, after about a minute and a half, you are still unsure, enter your best guess, flag the question for review and go on.

There is no penalty for wrong answers, so a guess is always better than a blank. And a flagged guess costs you nothing: if there is time at the end, you can return to it, often with a clearer head and more knowledge of the passage.

Why is this so hard to do? Because of a feeling psychologists call the sunk-cost effect: having invested two minutes in a question, we do not want to ‘waste’ them. Remember that every question is worth exactly one mark. Three minutes spent winning one hard mark is three minutes not spent winning two easy ones.

Which questions to do first

Within a passage, you do not have to answer the tasks in the order they are printed. A sensible order is:

1. Tasks whose questions follow the text: True/False/Not Given, completion tasks, short answers, multiple choice. These guide you through the passage from top to bottom.
2. Tasks with mixed order: matching information, matching features. By now you know the passage and can find things faster.

The exception is matching headings: if it comes first, do it during your skim (Lesson 5).

Using the on-screen tools to save time

• Highlight anchor words in the passage as you skim: names, dates, the first words of each paragraph’s topic. Later you can find them at a glance.
• Highlight keywords in the questions, especially word limits and words like NOT or TWO.
• Use the review flag for every guessed answer.
• Adjust the text size if it helps you; small text slows many readers down.
• Check the navigation bar before you finish: an unanswered question is shown differently from an answered one.

Where time is typically lost

Training your pace

Timing is a habit, and habits are built by repetition under realistic conditions.

Stage 1 – Accuracy without the clock (first few tests). Do passages untimed, using the methods from this course. Check every answer and understand every mistake. There is no point in practising speed on methods you have not yet learned.

Stage 2 – One passage, 20 minutes. Set a timer. When it rings, stop and guess the rest. Mark your work, then finish the passage untimed in a different colour. Compare the two scores: the difference is what timing is costing you.

Stage 3 – Full tests, 60 minutes. Sit a complete Reading test without pausing. Note the clock time at the end of each passage. Are you following the plan?

Stage 4 – Slightly faster than real. Give yourself 55 minutes. If you can manage that at home, the real test will feel comfortable.

Keep a simple log:

After five or six tests you will see your pattern: perhaps Passage 2 always runs over, or Passage 3 is always rushed. That tells you what to fix.

Reading faster in general

Exam technique helps, but there is no substitute for reading a lot. People who read English for thirty minutes a day, every day, for three months become noticeably faster, because they recognise common phrases as single units instead of decoding word by word. Choose sources that resemble IELTS passages: popular science magazines, the science and culture sections of quality newspapers, well-written non-fiction. Read for interest, not for study, and do not stop for every unknown word.

Key points

• 90 seconds per question on average; nobody has time to read everything closely.
• Aim for roughly 17 + 20 + 21 minutes, with two minutes to check.
• Guess, flag and move on after a minute and a half.
• Do in-order tasks before mixed-order matching tasks.
• Train in stages: accuracy first, then one passage in 20 minutes, then full tests.

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