Common sense can be your greatest ally in IELTS. So many IELTS students get bogged down in rules and strategies that they forget to use a common-sense approach and end up tying themselves in knots making it impossible to get to the heart of the question.
Ask yourself how many times you have chosen an answer in listening or reading and then changed it when you checked and checked again only to discover that your first, more instinctive answer was correct! Wouldn’t that be frustrating if in the exam all your answers had been correct and you changed them to incorrect ones? I’m sure that this must happen.
The two reasons that this happens is firstly sticking to very narrow rules and strategies which you may have heard about in the Chinese whispers of the internet, and secondly overthinking everything. It is the easiest thing in the world to persuade yourself of a different answer if you go over and over the text enough (I have to admit to having done this on occasion). One way of avoiding this is to work quickly so you don’t have time to agonise over answers. In the reading if you stick to 1 minute per question and keep moving then when you get to reviewing the answers you were not completely sure about you will have put some distance between yourself and your original searching. This will make you more objective and as a result you’ll make a better choice of answer – without the panic!
Missing a question here and there is not the end of the world. Achieving a score of 35 or 36 is a good score and will fulfil most people’s needs. If you have to get a higher score (for example Band 8 in GT then the way forward is more practise - not more panic).
Keeping your head in the exam is really important. There is, for many students, a danger of slipping back into ‘old ways’ on the day of the exam. I have seen this so many times - a student who should have achieved a really high score and didn’t and when I talked about this with them it turned out that they did all the things that I had advised them not to do. These were the things they were doing before we met and because they had been the ‘status quo’ in their former practice they slipped back into their comfort zone and made all the same old errors. This ‘comfort trap’ is common and goes against common sense – so keep confident and guard against it.
Here are some common things students sometimes do when common sense goes out of the window.
- Don’t try to’ squeeze’ in an answer to a question if it doesn’t seem sensible. It is far better to leave the question and come back later when you can be more impartial
- If there is a word you don’t know – don’t despair, look at the other words around it and make a guess – you will probably be correct
- Don’t be too ‘wedded’ to your answers – they might be wrong. Always be open to the fact that a prior one may not be correct and consider all the answers in the section (this is a key problem often with headings)
- Don’t ignore your instinct – if your language level is good then it may guide you better than you think
Here are some examples of the kinds of nonsensical mistakes that students can make (these are real examples from my own students’ difficulties in this area):
I. Historically, we find that many a great medical breakthrough, now rightly seen as a blessing, was in its own time condemned by bio-conservative moralists. Such was the case with anaesthesia during surgery and childbirth. People argued that it was unnatural and that it would weaken our moral fibre.
This is an extract from a reading passage about cloning. The question is matching information with paragraphs. This paragraph poses some vocabulary issues as underlined. A blessing is something positive and coupled with now rightly it tells us that today certain breakthroughs are good thing. We then discover that in the past (in its own time) they (e.g. use of anaesthetics in some cases) were condemned by people who took a more traditional or orthodox view (conservative) of science (bio) and promoted this view in the public domain (moralist) as they believed that it would affect the morality of the population (moral fibre).
Once we are able to break this down and paraphrase to get a better understanding we can now easily find the answer which is:
Similar situations (to the cloning which is the main topic of the passage)
II. ……..have been devoted by companies to producing hydrogen cars.
Devoted means loyal but it is important to remember that words in English often have multiple meanings (we can see this in the example above) and so the other words in the sentence must be considered too. Companies is a better choice of key word and in conjunction with cars we know that this information relates to the car industry and it’s development of hydrogen cars. Have been tells us this is already happening. With all of this we can locate the answer more easily:
Already car manufacturers around the world have invested billions of dollars in research and development.
Hydrogen as a fuel was in the previous sentence so we can be certain this is the place and the answer is ‘billions of dollars’. The students who struggled with this only looked at devoted and so were unable to find the right answer.
III. Summary of role: to improve IFCES’s ………. around the world
This is a sentence completion exercise from a General Training reading. The relevant information in the text is:
Job Summary
To raise the international profile of IFCES. To communicate our objectives, programmes and services to members, the chemical engineering community, the media and the wider public.
So many students chose ‘objectives’ for this question. The words ‘raise’ and ‘IFCES’ tell us that this relates directly to the organisation and involves some sort of increase. The information is in the first sentence NOT the second – profile. Improve and raise are synonyms here.
In these three examples students ‘jumped’ too quickly on to individual words without considering the whole question and making a sensible comparisons with the information in the text. Paraphrasing the question to get to the heart of what the question is really asking can be very useful.
You may feel that this all sounds like a lot of time but in reality once these techniques are practised over and over they will become second nature and you will notice the words and phrases which match straight away making the process both less stressful and faster. At the end of the day what is important is your score and rushing headlong into the wrong answer because you are using a ‘gut reaction’ rather than common sense will only keep your score low.