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  • Oh, what a great book.

  • Thank you, Jessica Whitehead.

  • Are you doing an IELTS exam or will you be doing an IELTS exam in the future?

  • Special shoutout to Pedro, thank you for helping me on this, and rock your exam.

  • You're going to do it, boy.

  • If you're studying IELTS, there's one section in the test that is difficult.

  • They're all difficult, but it's the reading section.

  • So, when you're doing your test, you have to read the passage quickly, you have to get

  • all of the wonderful information, and then you have to answer the questions.

  • So, what I want to help you do is something really cool called speed reading.

  • When I was in grade 2, my teacher taught me something that was amazing.

  • Usually when you read something, you take your little finger and you read along like this.

  • So my teacher taught me at the young age of eight to get a bookmark, and instead of reading

  • each word, you're going to read one whole sentence with an eyescape.

  • So, instead of reading word by word with your little finger, you're going to put a bookmark

  • on the sentence and you're going to focus on the sentence.

  • This allows you to read something much faster.

  • So, put your little finger away and grab a bookmark or a piece of paper.

  • So, number six is: Use a bookmark.

  • It helps you absorb the information faster.

  • Another thing that you can do or not do is when you're reading: "The pizza was a wide

  • pizza with ham and pineapple.

  • It was the most exiting flavours, it was..."

  • Don't read out loud.

  • Two reasons: One, there're other people around you that you're probably disturbing, and there's

  • probably been a scientific study that if you move your lips, you're doing extra work and

  • you're kind of wasting time.

  • Try and close your mouth.

  • Don't: "Ra-ra-ra-ra" under your breath, don't move your lips.

  • Just absorb it and read it.

  • This helps you go through it faster and ultimately get that high score that you've all been looking for.

  • Another tip is to pay attention to important key words.

  • So, these are going to be things like dates and times, numbers, and proper nouns.

  • So, please tell me you know what a proper noun is.

  • A proper noun is a place or a person.

  • It starts with a capital letter.

  • So, one really, really good thing you can do is you can take your little highlighter

  • and circle the important words.

  • When you come back to the reading section or when you've read it, it sticks in your

  • brain more.

  • This is good for practicing, too.

  • Some articles and some things have special punctuation.

  • So, dashes.

  • Dashes are a little line here and a little line at the end.

  • There's a very, very good reason why they've used dashes, and that is they're telling you

  • that this information is really important.

  • It's giving you something extra or something that changes the idea about the sentence.

  • So, the information between dashes or even between commas is put there for a reason,

  • and it's probably got some wealth of information, maybe the answer to question number seven.

  • Some readings that you have not necessarily on IELTS, but a newspaper if you're reading

  • something for fun...

  • Do people read for...?

  • Yeah, they do read for fun, Ronnie. Okay.

  • Is a special font.

  • So, if the words are bold which means they're bigger; or if they're written in italics which

  • means, like, handwriting; or if the words are underlined - this is going to give you

  • some really strong information that it's important because they made it like this.

  • When you first begin your IELTS test in the reading section, always read the questions

  • first, then you'll know what information you're looking for.

  • If you just read it willy-nilly without thinking

  • about the questions, you've wasted a lot of time.

  • So read the questions first, then go back and get the information that you need.

  • And about paragraphs, this is a tricky thing that they do.

  • I want you to read the first sentence, it's called the topic sentence.

  • The topic sentence has...

  • We'll say "the meat" or the importance of the paragraph.

  • Maybe in the middle of the paragraph they've got some information and it's useless, really,

  • because maybe the idea has changed.

  • So, the best thing you can do is read the first topic sentence, skim the rest of it,

  • and concentrate on the last, because maybe the idea has changed halfway through the sentence.

  • If you're going for your IELTS, good luck.

  • It's hard, but you can do it.

  • For more IELTS tips, stay tuned. Bye-bye.

Oh, what a great book.

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