Sixty minutes, forty questions, no extra time

Three passages, forty questions, sixty minutes — and unlike Listening, there is no extra time to transfer your answers. Whatever is on the answer sheet when the hour ends is what is marked.

That single fact reshapes everything. Most candidates who are disappointed by their Reading score could have answered most questions correctly given ninety minutes. They were not beaten by the English; they were beaten by the clock.

Twenty minutes per passage is the working budget, and the passages get harder. A sensible split is seventeen or eighteen minutes on the first, twenty on the second, and whatever is left on the third — because passage three is where the hardest vocabulary sits and where you least want to be rushing.

Academic and General Training differ here. Academic gives three long passages from journals, books and newspapers. General Training gives shorter everyday texts first — notices, advertisements, handbooks — then work-related material, then one longer passage. The *question types and strategies are identical*; only the texts change.

Every question is one mark. There is no penalty for a wrong answer. So the last two minutes of the hour are not for finishing carefully — they are for making sure no box is empty. A blank scores zero with certainty; a guess scores zero *or* one.

The single most damaging habit is reading the whole passage carefully before looking at the questions. It feels responsible and it is fatal. A 900-word academic passage read properly takes eight to ten minutes, which leaves ten minutes for thirteen questions — and you will then read most of it again anyway while hunting for answers.

The order that works is the reverse: look at the questions first, then go into the passage hunting. You are not reading for understanding. You are reading to locate.