Zestly

IELTS Academic & General Training

Practice for IELTS — Reading, Writing and Speaking, in the format each one is actually set.

Start here: three parts of four, and what is here today

This track does not cover Listening. A quiz question here is text; it has no audio, and pretending otherwise would waste the time of someone who has booked a test. Listening is 40 of the 160 marks that make your bands, so use a source with real recordings for it — IELTS publishes free sample audio, and the official practice tests exist for exactly this.

The other three are covered for both versions of the test: Academic Reading and Academic Writing, General Training Reading and General Training Writing, and Speaking, which is one test for everybody.

Which version you need

• IELTS Academic — for studying at degree level in an English-speaking country, and for professional registration. The vocabulary is the vocabulary of an academic setting.
• IELTS General Training — for migrating to Australia, Canada, New Zealand or the UK, and for training or study below degree level. It tests everyday English in social and workplace situations.

Listening and Speaking are identical in the two versions. Reading and Writing are not, and this is where people study the wrong thing: the Academic Reading gives you three long articles, the General Training Reading gives you notices and timetables, then workplace documents, then one long piece. Academic Writing Task 1 asks you to describe data or a process; General Training Task 1 asks you to write a letter. Task 2 is an essay in both.

If your visa route requires IELTS for UKVI, that is the same test content taken at a centre approved as a Secure English Language Test — the preparation is the same, the booking is not. IELTS Life Skills is a different test altogether, assessing only speaking and listening, and nothing here is aimed at it.

The numbers worth knowing before you book

• Listening — 4 parts, 40 questions, about 30 minutes. Recordings are played once only, in British, Australian, New Zealand and North American accents.
• Reading — 40 questions in 60 minutes, with no extra time to transfer answers. Academic: three passages, 2,150–2,750 words in total. General Training: three sections of increasing difficulty, 2,150–2,375 words.
• Writing — two tasks in 60 minutes. Task 1 at least 150 words in about 20 minutes; Task 2 at least 250 words in about 40 minutes. Task 2 counts for twice as much as Task 1, so finishing Task 1 beautifully and running out of time is the expensive mistake.
• Speaking — 11 to 14 minutes, face to face with an examiner, recorded. Part 1 is questions on familiar topics (4–5 min); Part 2 is the long turn — a task card, one minute to prepare, then about two minutes of talking; Part 3 is a discussion of the same topic in more abstract terms (4–5 min).

Scores are bands 0 to 9, in whole and half bands, one for each of the four parts plus an overall band that is their average — rounded up to the next half band at .25 and up to the next whole band at .75. Overall bands hide a lot, and the requirement you have to meet is often a minimum in each part, not just the average.

Reading and Listening are marked right or wrong — one mark per question, converted to a band. Writing and Speaking are marked against four published criteria each, weighted equally: for Writing, task achievement or task response, coherence and cohesion, lexical resource, and grammatical range and accuracy; for Speaking, fluency and coherence, lexical resource, grammatical range and accuracy, and pronunciation.

One Skill Retake is worth knowing about before you assume a bad day means sitting all four again: if you took the test on computer at a centre that offers it, you can retake one part within 60 days, once per original test. It is available in over 110 countries but not for tests taken in the USA.

How each part is practised here

Reading materials are full-length passages with the text in front of you on every question, exactly as the paper keeps it beside you for the whole hour. They drill the reasoning half of the paper — multiple choice, headings, matching, purpose, the writer's view, vocabulary in context — and above all the judgement that costs the most marks: whether a statement is contradicted by the text or simply never addressed by it. The types that ask you to write a word from the passage into a gap cannot be set as a quiz, and the category says so.

Writing is a printed paper you answer by hand and photograph. Both versions are here: an Academic paper describes data, a General Training paper is a letter with three bullet points to cover and a register to hold. The check comes back task by task against five things — length first, then the four criteria an examiner uses — and it names what your answer did not do rather than issuing a band. If you are sitting the computer-delivered test you will type on the day; the composition is the same, and longhand is a fair way to feel what 20 and 40 minutes are.

Speaking runs all three parts in order with an examiner that gives nothing away, and ends with a report on the four criteria, quoting you back to yourself. Use the microphone: an answer you can think is not an answer you can say to a stranger who is recording it.

How to use these materials

1. Find out which version and which minimum you need, from the university or the immigration route itself, before anything else. "IELTS 6.5" and "IELTS 6.5 with no band below 6" are different targets and lead to different revision.
2. Time the Reading from the start. The difficulty of the paper is 60 minutes for 40 questions with no transfer time, not the English in it.
3. Read the explanation even when you were right. On Not Given questions, knowing why the other three options are wrong is the entire skill.
4. Write a full Task 2 before you polish Task 1. It is worth double. Do it often enough that 250 words in 40 minutes stops being a question.
5. Say the Part 2 long turn out loud, timed, from one minute of notes. Two minutes of continuous speech is much longer than it sounds until you have done it a few times.

Official sources

Everything above is from the official IELTS site. Read it there too — it is short and free, and the test is run from it:

• The test types and who each is for: ielts.org — test types
• Academic format, part by part: reading · writing · speaking · listening
• General Training format: reading · writing
• How the bands are worked out: ielts.org — scoring in detail
• The writing criteria, explained by IELTS: ielts.org — writing band descriptors
• Free official sample questions, including the Listening audio this track does not provide: ielts.org — sample test questions
• Retaking one part: ielts.org — One Skill Retake

Zestly is an independent study tool. It is not affiliated with the British Council, IDP: IELTS Australia or Cambridge University Press & Assessment, who jointly own IELTS, and it is not a test centre. Every passage, question, writing task and cue card here is written by Zestly; no official test material is reproduced. Booking, fees, identification, test dates and the minimum scores you need are matters for IELTS and for the institution asking you for them.