The Reading routine that stops you running out of time
Three passages, sixty minutes, no extra transfer time. Here's the pacing plan that keeps passage three from eating your score.
Reading punishes pacing more than comprehension. Most students who finish with unanswered questions understood every passage perfectly well — they just spent nineteen minutes on the first one and then met the hardest passage with eleven minutes left.
The 17 / 20 / 23 split
Passages get harder as you go, so time shouldn't be split evenly. Give yourself seventeen minutes for passage one, twenty for passage two, twenty-three for passage three. Write those three clock times on your question paper the moment the test starts, and treat them as hard stops.
- Skim the passage for structure, not meaning — headings, first lines, any dates or names.
- Read the questions before the detail; they tell you what to hunt for.
- Answer question types in the order they appear, not by difficulty.
- If a question takes more than 90 seconds, mark it and move on. Come back only when the passage is done.
True / False / Not Given is a rules game
Not Given doesn't mean 'I couldn't find it'. It means the passage makes no claim either way. If you're deciding between False and Not Given, ask yourself: could I point to the sentence that contradicts this? If not, it's Not Given. Students lose two or three marks per test on this one distinction alone.
There's no transfer time in Reading. Write answers straight onto the sheet as you go — copying at the end has cost more bands than any vocabulary gap.
Practice it under a clock, or don't bother
Untimed reading practice builds comprehension you already have. Every practice passage from here on should be done against the split above, with a visible timer. Two weeks of that does more for your score than a month of vocabulary lists.