Practice Tips and Strategies
- time your practice sessions and allocate about 1 minute per question + 5 minutes reading time
- decide which question types YOU need to spend more time on (individual variation)
- practise a timed mock test 2 or 3 times before sitting the examination.
- identify the grammar area being tested when doing the Sentence Completion section, e.g. tenses, subject-verb agreement, articles, infinitive/gerund, parallel structure, relative pronouns and clauses etc
- discover usual associations of nouns, adjectives and verbs with prepositions for the Error Identification section
- use reading strategies to help you with the Reading Comprehension section:
- familiarise yourself with the passage, paying attention to the main idea and the structure
- use skim, scan and rapid reading techniques
- identify the topic sentence(s) in paragraphs
- read the question, find the lead/key words, make sure you understand what is being asked
- use lead words and line references in the questions to quickly find the relevant part of the passage
- use a process of elimination to strike out wrong answers
- read the short paragraph carefully for the Paragraph Improvement section and use these strategies:
- use hints from the context to eliminate the LESS CORRECT options
- look for the topic sentence
- get the main idea and pay attention to the linking words
- study the suggested changes within the given paragraph by paying careful attention to relationships between subject/verb etc.
Good Luck with Your Independent Study
