Common Mistakes: Reading

Every Reading mistake below has one thing in common: it has nothing to do with whether you understood the passage. A candidate can read fluently, follow the writer's argument, and still lose several marks to habits with nothing to do with comprehension — writing three words when the limit is two, transposing an answer into the wrong row, or guessing a True/False/Not Given item from memory rather than the text itself. These are worth hunting down in a dedicated review pass, because unlike a genuine vocabulary gap, they are entirely within your control to eliminate before test day, and every one fixed is effectively a free mark.

Violating the stated word limit is the single most common of these errors. If the instruction reads "no more than two words," and the passage says "a rapidly growing population," writing "rapidly growing population" as your answer is marked wrong for using three words, even though the substance is exactly right. The fix is mechanical: before you commit any answer, count the words in it against the stated limit, treating hyphenated compounds and numbers according to the task's own rules, and trim to the shortest phrase that still answers the question.

Spelling errors sink otherwise-correct answers just as often. If the passage says "phenomenon" and you write "phenomenom," the answer is incorrect, full stop — there is no partial credit for a recognisable near-miss. Because most Reading answers are copied directly from the passage rather than composed from memory, the fix is simple discipline: copy the exact spelling character by character from the text rather than typing from your own recollection of the word.

Not transferring answers within the allotted time is a purely logistical failure that has ended otherwise strong performances. Some candidates work through all forty questions on the question paper intending to transfer everything to the answer sheet at the end, then run out of the ten minutes (paper-based) or the built-in transfer step (computer-based) needed to do it properly, leaving several answers blank that were actually known. The fix is to transfer answers as you go, in small batches after each passage, rather than saving the entire transfer for a rushed final few minutes.

Misreading question numbers causes an entire block of answers to land one row too high or too low, especially in a fill-in-the-blank or matching section where nothing visually alerts you to the shift. A candidate who accidentally writes the answer to question 14 next to question 15 continues the same one-row offset for every subsequent answer, turning one small slip into ten wrong answers. The fix is to double-check the question number beside the answer line, not just the sequence, at least once every five to six answers, and always immediately after any question you skip.

Overconfidence in True/False/Not Given and Yes/No/Not Given questions leads candidates to answer from what they already believe about the topic rather than from what the passage actually states. If a passage never mentions whether a historical event caused a policy change, and a candidate happens to know from outside knowledge that it did, the correct answer is still Not Given — the task tests only what is written in front of you, and any outside knowledge, however accurate, is irrelevant and actively misleading here. The fix is to locate the exact sentence in the passage that the question is based on before answering, every time, rather than relying on a instinctive feel for the topic.