Reading: Time Management Across Three Passages

IELTS Reading gives you 60 minutes for 40 questions spread across three passages of rising difficulty, with no extra transfer time built in on the computer-delivered test and only a small buffer on paper — which makes time management less a matter of speed and more a matter of budgeting and recovery. The specific mistake that costs candidates the most marks isn't reading too slowly in general, it's reading Passage 1 at a comfortable, generous pace because it feels easy, then discovering with ten minutes left that Passage 3 — the longest and densest of the three — hasn't been touched. A slow, confident start doesn't feel like a mistake while it's happening, which is exactly why it's the one worth guarding against most deliberately.

A reasonable default budget allocates time unevenly across the three passages rather than splitting 60 minutes into three equal twenty-minute blocks: something like 17 minutes for Passage 1, 18 for Passage 2, and roughly 20 for Passage 3, since Passage 3 tends to carry the longest sentences, the most abstract vocabulary, and often the highest concentration of matching-type questions, which are themselves more time-expensive per question than completion or short-answer questions. This isn't a rigid formula — some candidates find Passage 2 harder than Passage 3 depending on topic and question mix — but having any explicit per-passage target, checked against a clock or watch at fixed points, beats having no target and only noticing you're behind once it's already severe.

The harder skill than budgeting itself is noticing early that you're falling behind and adjusting rather than pushing through on hope. A practical checkpoint: if you're not roughly halfway through a passage's questions by the midpoint of that passage's allotted time, that's the signal to speed up immediately — skip anything you're stuck on rather than fighting it, mark a best guess, and keep moving forward through the remaining questions in that passage before circling back, if time allows, to what you skipped. Waiting until you're five minutes over budget to make this decision usually means the adjustment comes too late to protect the next passage.

Because every question on the test is worth exactly one mark regardless of its type or difficulty, a slow, hard-fought correct answer on Passage 2 is not worth more than an easy, fast correct answer you haven't yet reached on Passage 3 — which means protecting your ability to attempt every question in the test matters more than maximising your accuracy on any single difficult one. This reframes what "struggling" on a question should trigger: the right response to being stuck for more than roughly a minute past what a question type should normally take isn't to keep re-reading the same two sentences, it's to make your most informed guess, note the question number in case you have spare time at the end, and move on — the ten seconds spent guessing costs far less than the ninety seconds spent perfecting one answer at the expense of three unattempted questions elsewhere.