Lesson One: Learning How to Manage OurTime
Perhaps you have this very fundamental problem. This is an important problem as well. Knowing how much time to spend for each question is as important as knowing how much we should spend for reading each passage.
Many candidates find it really difficult to adapt themselves to 60 minutes time restriction. Though you may feel that you are going to answer only 40 questions and finally you will have 20 additional minutes to review your answers, we should mention and remind you that we have 3 passages to read as well. So how it would be possible to read and answer 40 questions at the same time?
What we need to clarify first is that, if you are aiming for a band 7, you will not have any problems with time management. However, this does not mean that you should ignore the importance of managing your time. You will need to answer 30 to 32 question in academic module to get 7. So, make sure you can do it in 60 minutes. Let us take a look at the following table which provides us with how many questions we should answer for getting different band scores in academic module:
Now the question is, is the general training harder than academic module since in order to get 7 in general training we need to answer more questions correctly?
The answer is, NO!
It does not matter which module you are going to take; you have to be able to understand most texts to get high band score. The reason why you need to answer more questions in general training, could be the length of the texts that you are going to read and answer. The length of general training passages is shorter than academic module. So, it may be the reason why we should answer more questions only for the sake of being fair to both groups of test takers.
Now, let us answer the following question:
How much time should I spend to read the texts, read the questions and answer them, and transfer my answers onto my answer sheet?
1: 5 minutes to read each passage. We have 3 passages, so the total time we should spend for each passage is 15 minutes
2: 1 minute to answer each question. We have 40 questions, therefore, we should spend a total time of 40 minutes for the whole questions
3. 5 minutes for transferring the answers onto your answer sheet.
Sounds pretty much frustrating. But do not worry, I am going to tell you what to do.
Now let us say you have to go through the text so quickly and then you need to go through questions at the same speed. The techniques are going to be given to you in the next lessons. In the next lesson, we are talking about how to learn vocabulary.
