The problem that most of test taker deal with in reading IELTS comes from fear that they have even before they start reading the whole passage. Reading IELTS will be academic text which is sometimes not really familiar for test takers. In this case, you need to remember that being panic does not give you anything. Now, let us learn on how to predict what is the passage in the reading section is about.
Reading passages are only text. They have some items in every passage such as titles, paragraph headings, sub-headings, italicized or bold type, pictures, diagram and other visual information, and tables and charts. You can use these items to have ‘smart guessing’ on what kind of information that the passage is going to give. For example, when you see a picture, you can ask yourself some questions such as:
- What is happening?
- Who is doing it?
- Where is it taking place?
- Why is it being done?
- What is needed to do it?
- What other things do I know about this?
You can try to ask such kind of questions to help you get the prediction. You will be more confident in answering questions and finding the information in the passage because you are using your prior knowledge to help you. Actually, that is the thing we do every day every time we read something. However, it should be noted that for answering the section of T/F/NG, you need to be very careful because may take a wrong answer when you merely use your prior knowledge. Remember that prior knowledge should only be a kind of help for you to predict what is the passage is about. Still, you need to check the answer from the reading passage.
As your daily exercise, you can try to read English newspaper. You can write some questions about a newspaper article after looking at the headings and pictures. Then, find out whether you can find the answer in the passage.
Source: http://www.ieltstips.com/reading_strategies_pdfs/how_can_i_predict_what_the_passage_is_about.pdf
