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The four numbers between you and an offer
IELTS
Notes, marked writing and practice for IELTS Academic and General Training — free, and built for Chinese candidates.
Diagnostic and study plan · Academic → · General Training →
Where you are
Put in your four practice bands. Universities set a floor on each skill as well as on the overall band, so the weakest number usually decides the offer.
Writing practice and revision
Get an essay marked, now Write a response, review feedback on the text, and revise one passage. Automated estimates are unvalidated; use the task demands and specific explanations to guide practice. 40 Task 2 essays · 30 Academic Task 1 figures · 10 General Training lettersThe four skills
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Listening
40 questions, played once. Marks go two ways: missing the meaning — a paraphrase, a self-correction, a distractor — and hearing it but writing it wrong: spelling, plurals, numbers.
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Reading
60 minutes, no transfer time. Which task type costs you marks is personal — True / False / Not Given for some, matching headings for others. The timed practice below shows your own pattern.
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Writing
Task 2 counts double. In Task 1, skipping the overview holds Task Achievement down — the published descriptors require a clear overview above band 5, however good the English is.
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Speaking
Two minutes on the long turn, and pronunciation is a quarter of the band.
Full four-skill mocks
Original practice under the real clocks: Listening, Reading, Writing and a Speaking interview in one sitting. Raw accuracy only — difficulty is not calibrated and no official band is predicted.
Official sample tasks
The Library holds the sample tasks and recordings IDP and Cambridge publish for candidates — one task type at a time, with the audio for Listening and an answer key where one was issued.
IELTS releases no dated past-paper series, so there is no archive of real tests to download here or anywhere else. Everything we write ourselves is practice material written for this site, and it is labelled as such.
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