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.
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.
The one thing that moves a band fastest
Get an essay marked, now Write under the real word limit and get all four IELTS criteria scored, the memorised phrases named, and one part of your own writing rewritten a band higher. Writing is the lowest skill for most Chinese candidates and the hardest to fix alone. 40 Task 2 essays · 30 Academic Task 1 figures · 10 General Training lettersThe four skills
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Listening
40 questions, played once. The marks go on spelling, plurals and numbers — not on understanding.
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Reading
60 minutes, no transfer time. True / False / Not Given costs more marks than every other task type together.
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Writing
Task 2 counts double. Task 1 needs an overview sentence or it cannot pass band 5.
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Speaking
Two minutes on the long turn, and pronunciation is a quarter of the band.
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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