Reading
Understanding indirect sentences and unknown words without a dictionary. With a practice exercise and answers.
IELTS reading vocabulary in context is the skill of working out what a sentence means without understanding every word in it. You will meet words you do not know in every reading test, and you are not expected to know them.
The harder problem is not unknown vocabulary at all. It is indirect sentences: constructions where every word is familiar and the meaning is still not immediately clear, usually because a negative or a comparison has been buried in the phrasing.
Indirect sentences
Six constructions that mean the opposite of how they first read.
Not unusual means usual. Not unlike means similar to. The two negatives cancel, and candidates reading quickly take the surface meaning.
Everything after this phrase is false. It is a popular misconception that chocolate causes spots means chocolate does not cause spots.
Means probably will not, not will not. The difference matters in True False Not Given, where certainty is the whole question.
Refers back and reverses the previous sentence. Most people think it is the capital. This, however, is a mistake means it is not the capital.
Public healthcare has nothing like the resources of private healthcare means it has far fewer, not that the resources are different in kind.
Everything following is false. Reading past this opening turns a correct understanding into a wrong answer.
Method
Six steps, and the first one saves the most time.
Most unknown words are not in the answer. Read to the end of the sentence before you stop, and carry on if the meaning is clear enough.
Context usually gives you enough. If a word sits in a list of things that are all negative, it is negative too, and that is often all you need.
Prefixes and suffixes carry meaning. Un, dis, mis and in reverse; tion, ment and ness make nouns; able and ive make adjectives.
Even if you cannot get the meaning, knowing whether it is a noun, verb or adjective often tells you enough to answer the question.
Any sentence containing not with a negative adjective needs a second reading. This is where confident readers lose marks.
When a sentence is unclear, candidates fall back on what they believe is true. The answer must come from the passage, however reasonable your assumption is.
Practice
For each sentence, choose the option that means the same thing.
Every sentence below contains a construction that reverses or qualifies its surface meaning.
Read each one twice. Identify the negative or the comparison, work out what it applies to, then choose the option that says the same thing in plain terms.
In the real test these appear inside long passages, where they are much easier to read past.
1One thing that is not true about the region is that the weather is always bad.
The weather is sometimes good. Not true and always bad cancel to give sometimes good. Never bad goes too far, which is exactly the trap.
2Most people think it is the capital. This, however, is a common mistake.
It is not the capital. This refers back to the belief in the previous sentence, and calling it a mistake reverses it.
3It is highly unlikely that the government will reduce taxes.
Taxes probably will not be reduced. Unlikely is not the same as will not, and nothing is said about increases. Both wrong options overstate the certainty.
4It is a popular misconception that chocolate causes spots.
Spots are not caused by chocolate. A misconception is a widely held false belief, so everything that follows the phrase is untrue.
5It is not unusual for people here to eat their main meal at midday.
People commonly eat at midday. Not unusual is a double negative meaning usual, and it reads as the opposite at speed.
6Public healthcare has nothing like the resources available to private healthcare.
Public healthcare has far fewer resources. Nothing like is a comparison of quantity, not of kind, which is what option B is offered to catch.
Indirect sentences do that. They are not a vocabulary problem, they are a construction problem, and the only fix is meeting enough of them to read them slowly by reflex.
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Isolated sentences are the easy version. Buried inside a nine-hundred-word passage, under time, these are much easier to read straight past.
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No, and you are not expected to. Most unknown words are not in any answer. Read to the end of the sentence before deciding whether a word matters.
Use the sentence around it, look at prefixes and suffixes, and work out the word class. Often knowing whether a word is positive or negative is enough to answer.
A construction where two negatives cancel, such as not unusual meaning usual, or not unlike meaning similar to. They are common in academic writing and easy to misread.
No. Dictionaries are not permitted in any part of the test, which is why working out meaning from context is a skill worth practising.
Usually because of an indirect construction: a buried negative, a comparison of quantity, or a sentence that reverses the one before it.
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Strategy takes most candidates to about Band 6.5. Past that the limit is the range of language you recognise at speed, and knowing where you actually sit is the first step.
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