How to finish IELTS Reading in 60 minutes without guessing the last passage

Academic Reading is 40 questions in 60 minutes, three passages, no extra transfer time. Divide it evenly and you get 20 minutes a passage — and that even split is the first mistake. Passage 1 is consistently the easiest and Passage 3 the densest, yet most candidates spend their calmest, freshest 25 minutes on Passage 1 and then guess the last ten questions in a panic. The band cost is brutal: ten guessed questions on a three-option task run at roughly three correct by luck, and those seven lost marks are often the whole distance between 6.0 and 7.0.

The 17–20–23 split

Set three checkpoints before you open the paper:

• Passage 1: 17 minutes. Finished by minute 17.
• Passage 2: 20 minutes. Finished by minute 37.
• Passage 3: 23 minutes. Finished by minute 60.

The uneven split reflects how the paper is built, not a trick. Passage 1 questions mostly follow passage order and test sentence-level fact-finding; Passage 3 leans on matching headings, writer's-views and multi-paragraph inference — the tasks that punish a tired reader. Banking three minutes early buys them back where they are worth the most.

Read the questions before the passage — but only some of them

The blanket advice "read questions first" wastes time on question types it does not fit. Split them:

Read first: completion tasks (sentence, note, table, summary) and short-answer questions. These name concrete things — dates, materials, people — that your eye can catch during the first read. Underline the keyword in each before touching the passage.

Do not read first: matching headings and matching information. Holding seven paragraph headings in your head while reading produces neither good reading nor good matching. For these, read the passage first at paragraph level — one sentence of your own per paragraph in the margin — then match against your own summaries. Telling the task types apart in the first place is its own drillable skill: there is a wording-to-type table for naming every question type from its instruction line.

What "reading" should mean under the clock

You have roughly 90 seconds of actual reading per paragraph across the whole test. That budget buys you one honest pass: first sentence carefully, the rest at a pace where you register topic and attitude, not detail. Detail is what you come back for once a question names it. Candidates who "read properly first, then answer" — the method that works at home with tea — routinely report finishing Passage 2 at minute 45.

The skill to practise is not speed reading; it is location: given a question keyword, put your finger on the right paragraph within 20 seconds. That is trainable in two weeks of timed sections, and it is the single highest-return Reading skill per hour of practice.

The falling-behind rules

Decide these before the exam, because you will not decide them well during it:

1. Any single question over 90 seconds gets a mark in the margin and a provisional answer. Not skipped — answered with your best guess, flagged for return. A flagged guess costs nothing; a blank you forget to fill costs a mark.
2. At a missed checkpoint, move anyway. Mid-task, mid-paragraph, move. The next passage's easy questions are worth more than this passage's hardest one.
3. The last 90 seconds are for blanks, not review. There is no penalty for wrong answers. Every blank gets something; on True/False/Not Given, statistically favour the option you have used least.

A weekly plan that builds the clock in

Practising untimed and "adding time later" does not work; pacing is part of the skill, not a garnish on it.

• Weeks out from the exam, twice a week: one full three-passage section at 60 minutes, checkpoints enforced, then a slow review of every miss — was it English, or was it the clock? Tag each one. A free Reading and Listening diagnostic that breaks results down by question type does that tagging for your starting point.
• Daily, 20 minutes: one passage at its checkpoint time. Rotate the passage-1/2/3 position so you regularly face passage-3 difficulty.
• Stop reviewing content, start reviewing decisions. After each timed run, list where the minutes actually went. The pattern is usually two or three questions that took four minutes each — the exact habit the 90-second rule exists to break.

Candidates at band 6 who fix nothing but pacing typically recover four to six marks on the same English. There is no other week of Reading work with that exchange rate.