Virtuous English AcademyWhat the paper contains
Both versions have three sections, forty questions and a strict sixty minutes. Both are marked out of forty, and both convert that raw score to a band. What differs is the reading material.
Academic Reading
Three long texts, taken from sources such as books, journals, magazines and newspapers, and selected for a general readership rather than for specialists. The texts progress from descriptive and factual towards discursive and analytical, so the third is normally the hardest. They may include diagrams, graphs or illustrations, and where a text depends on genuinely technical vocabulary a short glossary is provided. Together the three run to roughly two to three thousand words.
General Training Reading
The same forty questions, spread across material you would meet in daily life rather than in a library. The first section takes short everyday texts — notices, advertisements, timetables, small print — and is sometimes described as social survival. The second turns to the workplace: job descriptions, contracts, staff handbooks, training documents. The third is a single longer text on a general-interest subject, closer in feel to the Academic paper.
The question types, and what each is really testing
The published question types are stable, and a paper will use a subset of them. Recognising the type instantly matters, because each one rewards a different reading behaviour — and using the wrong behaviour is how a strong reader scores badly.
Multiple choice
One answer from four, or several from a longer list. The distractors are built from information genuinely present in the text but attached to the wrong thing — the right fact about the wrong person, or a true statement that does not answer the question asked.
Read the question stem twice before looking at the options.
True / False / Not Given
You judge a statement against the factual content of the text. The distinction that decides the mark is between contradicted and absent, and it is the single biggest source of lost points on the paper.
Covered in detail in the next section.
Yes / No / Not Given
The same three-way judgement applied to the writer’s views and claims rather than to facts. It appears on more argumentative texts, where the difficulty is separating what the writer asserts from what they merely report.
Ask: is the writer saying this, or quoting someone who is?
Matching headings
Choose a heading for each paragraph from a longer list. It tests whether you can identify the main idea of a paragraph rather than a striking detail inside it, and the wrong headings are usually built from exactly those details.
Decide the paragraph’s point in your own words first, then look at the list.
Matching information
Locate which paragraph contains a given piece of information. This one genuinely requires scanning the whole text, and unlike most types the answers are not in text order.
Leave it until after the in-order question sets.
Matching features and sentence endings
Attach statements to a list of people, places, dates or theories, or complete half-sentences from a list. Both test whether you can hold a relationship in mind across a long paragraph.
Grammar narrows sentence endings before meaning does.
Completion tasks
Sentence, summary, note, table, flow-chart and diagram completion. All of them impose a word limit — typically no more than two or three words, or a number — and all require words taken from the passage exactly as written.
Exceeding the word limit scores zero, however correct the meaning.
Short-answer questions
Answer a direct question about factual detail in the text, again within a stated word limit. The most straightforward type on the paper, and the one where careless over-writing wastes the easiest marks.
Answer in the fewest words that are still complete.
Two structural facts are worth memorising, because they save real time. Most question sets follow the order of the text, so the answer to question 12 sits below the answer to question 11 — matching-information questions are the notable exception. And the words in the question will rarely be the words in the passage: the paper is built on paraphrase, so hunting for an identical phrase is usually hunting for a trap.
True, False, Not Given: the distinction that decides the mark
Almost everyone who loses marks here loses them the same way, by treating Not Given as a category for uncertainty. It is not. All three answers are positive judgements about the relationship between a statement and a text, and the judgement is narrow.
- True — the text states this, or states something that necessarily means it. Not something that makes it likely; something that makes it certain.
- False — the text states the opposite, or something that cannot be true at the same time as the statement.
- Not Given — the text neither confirms nor contradicts it. The information is simply absent, or the text stops short of the claim being made.
The test is easier to apply as a question: could both the text and this statement be true at once? If yes, and the text does not actually say it, the answer is Not Given. If they cannot both be true, the answer is False.
1. Text: “The library was built in 1898 and extended twice in the following century.” Statement: The library has been extended more than once.
Answer: True. “Extended twice” necessarily means more than once. This is the safe kind of True — a restatement, not an inference about what probably happened.
2. Text: “The library was built in 1898 and extended twice in the following century.” Statement: The library is the oldest building in the town.
Answer: Not Given. The text dates the building but says nothing about any other building. It might well be the oldest — but “might well be” is exactly the situation Not Given exists for.
3. Text: “Attendance fell steadily after 2015, despite a well-funded publicity campaign.” Statement: The publicity campaign increased attendance.
Answer: False. The text says attendance fell despite the campaign. The statement and the text cannot both be true, which is the definition of False rather than Not Given.
One further discipline: your own knowledge is not evidence. If you happen to know that a claim is correct, and the text does not say so, the answer is still Not Given. The paper is testing reading, not general knowledge, and candidates with strong subject knowledge lose marks here more often than candidates without it.
Timing: the constraint that actually decides your band
Sixty minutes, forty questions, three texts, and — this is the detail that catches people out — no additional time at the end to copy answers onto the answer sheet. In Listening you get that time. In Reading you do not. On a paper-based test, writing your answers onto the sheet has to happen inside the hour.
A workable division is twenty minutes per section, but not spent evenly. The first text is normally the most accessible, so finishing it in seventeen or eighteen minutes buys time for the third, which is where the difficult questions cluster. Candidates who spend a full twenty minutes on section one arrive at section three with a deficit they cannot recover.
- Skim the text for shape, not content — roughly a minute. What is each paragraph doing? Is this describing, comparing, or arguing?
- Read the question set before reading the text closely, and note which types you have been given. Matching-information questions are the ones to save for last.
- Work through the in-order questions, letting them pull you down the text rather than reading the whole passage first.
- Answer every question, including the ones you are unsure of. There is no penalty for a wrong answer, so a blank is a guaranteed zero where a guess is not.
- Transfer answers as you finish each section, not at the end. Candidates who leave the transfer to the last five minutes are the ones who run out of them.
How many correct answers is a band worth?
Raw scores out of forty are converted to a band, and the conversion is not identical on every test version — the boards adjust it so that a band means the same thing on an easier or harder paper. The figures below come from officially published practice material and are typical rather than guaranteed. Use them to set a target, not to predict a result.
| Band | Academic Reading (of 40) | General Training Reading (of 40) |
|---|---|---|
| 9.0 | 39–40 | 40 |
| 8.5 | 37–38 | 39 |
| 8.0 | 35–36 | 37–38 |
| 7.5 | 33–34 | 36 |
| 7.0 | 30–32 | 34–35 |
| 6.5 | 27–29 | 32–33 |
| 6.0 | 23–26 | 30–31 |
| 5.5 | 19–22 | 27–29 |
| 5.0 | 15–18 | 23–26 |
| 4.5 | 13–14 | 19–22 |
| 4.0 | 10–12 | 15–18 |
Indicative raw-score-to-band conversion for Reading. General Training is marked on a stricter scale, so the same band needs more correct answers.
Two things follow from this table. First, band 7 on Academic Reading means roughly three-quarters correct, which is a demanding but ordinary target — it does not require perfection. Second, the gap between 6.0 and 7.0 is about seven questions, and seven questions is very often exactly what poor timing costs. Improving the clock is usually cheaper than improving the English.
Building reading speed without a course
Reading speed is not a technique that can be installed in a fortnight. It is a by-product of volume, and the candidates who improve fastest are the ones who read a great deal of English that has nothing to do with the exam, alongside a small amount of timed practice that does.
Read above your comfort level, daily
Twenty minutes a day of text slightly harder than you find easy does more for your reading band than an hour of drills. The point is exposure to complex sentence structure until it stops slowing you down.
Attack the paraphrase problem directly
The paper is built on restatement, so vocabulary breadth is what makes a passage navigable. Academic and abstract vocabulary pays back fastest, because that is where the paraphrases live.
Read the grammar of long sentences
Most reading breakdowns are structural, not lexical: a relative clause nested inside a passive inside a conditional. Studying those structures as a reader makes long sentences parse at speed.
Review wrong answers properly
For every question you get wrong, find the exact line that settles it and write down why your answer was wrong. Ten questions reviewed this way teach more than a hundred answered and forgotten.
This is the single highest-value habit in self-preparation.