Everything below is about the IELTS Reading test itself — what it asks, what changes when you take it on a computer, and what each question type is really testing. The tests above are the practice; this is the part people usually have to piece together from a dozen forum posts.

What the Reading test asks of you

You get 60 minutes, three sections and 40 questions. Every correct answer is worth one mark, so your raw score is out of 40, and that raw score is what becomes a band from 1 to 9 in whole or half bands.

The 60 minutes are all you get. On the paper test people are used to a separate answer sheet; on the computer there is nothing to copy across at the end, because what you type into the box is already your answer. That sounds like a small difference and it is not — it means the clock running out catches you mid-question rather than mid-transfer, and most people who lose marks to time lose them in the last section.

Reading is the section where pace decides the score. Three sections in 60 minutes is about 20 minutes each, and the last text is usually the hardest, so an even split is already a mistake.

Academic or General Training — which one you take

Same length, same 40 questions, same hour. Different texts.

• Academic Reading gives you three long texts, between 2,150 and 2,750 words in total, taken from the kind of writing you meet at university — journals, books, serious magazines. The subject can be anything; you are never expected to know it already.
• General Training Reading spreads the same 40 questions over 2,150 to 2,375 words in three sections with different jobs. Section 1 is everyday survival English — notices, advertisements, timetables, the sort of text you skim for one detail. Section 2 is about work: job adverts, contracts, staff handbooks. Section 3 is one longer text on a general subject, closer in feel to the Academic papers.

Take the one your university, employer or immigration programme asks for. If you are not sure, ask them before you book — the two results are not interchangeable, and that is not a mistake you want to find out about afterwards.

What changes when you read on a screen

The text does not change. How you work with it does, and that is the whole reason this site exists.

• The passage and the questions share the screen. Passage on one side, questions on the other, with a divider you can drag. There is no flipping back and forth between a booklet and an answer sheet, but there is also less of the passage visible at once than a printed page gives you.
• You highlight instead of underlining. Select the words, right-click, choose highlight. Nobody marking your test can see your highlights, so use as many as you like — but a page highlighted everywhere is a page with nothing marked.
• There is a notes panel. It opens beside the task and you can hide it again. People who are used to scribbling in the margin need somewhere to put that, and this is it.
• Font size, colours and volume are yours to set, and there is a timer on screen whether you want one or not.
• You can move between questions freely, forward and back, as often as you like.

None of that is hard. It is just unfamiliar, and unfamiliar costs minutes you have not got. Practising on a screen that behaves this way is cheaper than practising on paper and then meeting the screen on test day.

The Reading question types, one by one

These are the question types used in the tests on this site. Each one is a different skill with a different trap, and the test pages above link straight down to whichever ones that test contains.

True / False / Not Given

You are given a statement and you decide whether the passage says it (True), contradicts it (False), or does not say either way (Not Given). On screen each one is a drop-down or a set of buttons, and they follow the order of the passage.

The whole difficulty is False against Not Given. False needs the passage to say the opposite; Not Given means it simply never settles the question. If you find yourself reasoning “well, that could not be true, because…”, you are arguing from your own knowledge and the answer is almost certainly Not Given.

Matching headings

A list of headings, and you choose the one that fits each paragraph. There are always more headings than paragraphs, so some are never used, and they do not come in passage order.

Read the paragraph for what it is doing, not for the words it contains — headings are written so that two of them share a keyword with the same paragraph. Do the paragraphs you are sure about first and cross those headings off; the hard ones get much easier once four options are gone.

Matching information to paragraphs

A piece of information, and you name the paragraph that contains it. Unlike matching headings this is about one detail, not the paragraph's overall point, and a paragraph can be the answer more than once or not at all.

This is the type that eats time, because the information can be anywhere. Leave it until you have done the question types that run in passage order — by then you will know roughly where everything is.

Matching features

Statements matched to a list of people, places, studies, years or categories pulled from the passage. Who said what, which theory belongs to whom, which period something happened in.

Find each name in the passage and mark it before you read the statements, so you are matching against a map rather than hunting through the text once per question. Options can repeat, and the instructions will tell you so.

Sentence completion

Half a sentence, and you complete it with words from the passage, inside a word limit. The screen gives you a box to type into, so the answer is whatever you type — there is nothing else to tick.

Two things decide the mark: the word limit and the grammar. Read your finished sentence back; if it does not read as English, the words are not the right ones, however much they look like the passage.

Summary completion

A shortened version of the passage, or part of it, with gaps. Sometimes you choose from a box of words, sometimes you take the words from the passage yourself.

Work out what kind of word each gap needs — noun, verb, number — before you go looking. The summary paraphrases the passage rather than quoting it, so matching by sound rarely works; matching by grammar does.

Note completion

Notes in short, broken-up form with gaps to fill. The layout tells you as much as the words do: indentation groups things, so a gap under a sub-heading belongs to that sub-heading.

Notes follow the passage closely and in order, which makes these some of the cheapest marks in the test. Keep to the word limit and copy the spelling exactly.

Table completion

A table with cells left empty. The row and column headings tell you exactly what belongs in the gap, which makes this the most structured completion task in the test.

Read along the row and down the column before you answer — the heading is usually the thing that tells you whether the answer is a date, a price or a name. Watch for units: if the column says “$m”, writing “$4 million” is the wrong answer.

Multiple choice (one answer)

A question with three or four options and exactly one right answer, selected with a radio button.

The wrong options are built out of the passage, so every one of them will feel familiar. Find the part of the passage the question points at, decide what it says in your own words, and only then look at the options — reading the options first is what makes two of them look equally right.

Where the marks actually go

Almost nobody loses Reading marks because the passage was too hard. These are the real causes, in roughly the order they cost people answers:

• Spelling. A completion answer spelled wrong is wrong, and there is no spell-check. If the word is in the passage, copy it exactly as it is written there.
• Going over the word limit. “No more than two words” means two. Three words is a zero even when the meaning is perfect, and “a” and “the” count.
• Singular and plural. If the passage says fees, write fees. This one is pure carelessness and it is worth several marks across a test.
• Answering from what you know. True / False / Not Given punishes general knowledge harder than anything else in the test. The question is only ever about what this passage says.
• Running out of time in section three. Spending 25 minutes on the first text and 12 on the last is the single most common way to end up with blanks.
• Leaving anything blank. There is no penalty for a wrong answer. An empty box cannot earn a mark; a guess can.

How to get something out of these tests

A practice test you do not review is an hour spent to learn one number. What actually moves a Reading score:

• Do one test under the full 60 minutes, in one sitting, without pausing. The point is the pace, and you cannot practise pace in ten-minute pieces.
• Review by question type, not question by question. The results screen groups your answers by type, so you can see that you are fine on completion tasks and losing four marks every time on matching headings. That is the thing worth fixing.
• Go back to the passage for every wrong answer and find the words that made the right answer right. If you cannot find them, the answer was a guess — and guesses that happen to be correct are the ones that hide a weakness.
• Retake a test a week later. You will remember some answers; you will also find out whether the technique stuck.
• Use the highlighting deliberately. Mark the question words first, then the place in the passage you found them. It makes checking an answer a five-second job instead of a re-read.

Questions people ask about IELTS Reading

The format figures above — 60 minutes, three sections, 40 questions, 2,150–2,750 words — come from the official Academic Reading format and General Training Reading format pages, checked 2 October 2026.