Imagine, you went to visit an unknown place. You were walking along a highway there. Suddenly, a car came and picked you up. When the vehicle was moving forward, then you started to observe some unusual things: the driver did not say the destination of his trip. Still, as you are very clever, you wanted to manage this situation by noticing signpost beside the road. If you could have done this, at least, you would get some names, then can know your location. But, to its worst, you see even not a single signpost by the road. So, you feel anxious and disoriented. This situation sounds terrible. Isn’t it?

Similarly, most of the IELTS candidates start to read a paragraph without knowing the aim to read it. Bad situation goes worse when they even cannot understand the details part of the paragraph, which eventually, adds insult to injury to them. Then, Confusion runs high and time management gets messed up. This bewildering circumstance is also very alarming for the students in the exam.

IELTS Makes Thing Easy For You

 Unlike the bus driver, IELTS question makers are very kind enough to you. Structure of reading paragraph is rather very straightforward. Mostly, they write every paragraph with the similar type of structure. Firstly, they tell you about the main purpose of the paragraph, we say it as topic sentence. Usually, they place this sentence at the beginning of the paragraph, at the first sentence or the second to be exact.

Secondly, IELTS reading passage writer gives Supporting details immediate after a topic sentence. Supporting details is, in fact, arguments about the topic. Test maker do it so by showing his agreement, disagreement, compare, and contrast with the topic sentence. And of course, for the convenience of the test takers, a writer provides some lexical signposts-getting such clues were desperately needed when you were in the highway- to follow his arguments. For example, if he begins a sentence with ‘however’, it means, he is intending to tell something ‘opposite’ to the previously said idea, or notion.Similarly, ‘moreover’ signpost means, he is going to further support the idea, which he is already being discussed.This common pattern makes speed reading easy and finding answer quickly in the test.

In conclusion, the structure of every paragraph of the reading passage is more or less the same. The person who makes a question, he/she introduces a specific topic at the starting part of a paragraph. Then he/she writes details: Supporting point, compare, contrast, etc. And, you can follow these details by noticing lexical signposts: In addition, similarly and but for example. In other words, these signposts can make the skimming and scanning process very convenient for you.