Important Information for IELTS exam

The International English Language Testing System (IELTS) is basically meant to evaluate the English language skill of the native speakers. The IELTS exam is executed and administered by IDP Education, British Council and Cambridge English Language Assessment and has been offered since 1980. IELTS exam is conducted in 140 countries in number of the test centers and annually 2.4 million people appear in the IELTS exam. Basically there are three versions of IELTS and they are academic, general and life skills. The academic test is taken for the University applicants, professionals take general training exam which is for immigration visas, skilled workers. And the IELTS life skills test acquires basic language skill for the UK citizenship and visas.In the IELTS academic and general training test basically four sections are evaluated and they are listening, speaking, reading and writing.

Listening

Further listening consists of 40 questions and each section consists of 10 questions. The first section is the conversation between the two people on the general topic and the main objective is to convey information. The second section is the monologue and in this case also general topic is discussed. Regarding the third and the fourth section it includes conversations and monologues respectively in academic context. The question nature includes moltiple choices, fill in the blanks, and chart completion. The total time allocated for the IELTS listening is 30minutes and additional 10 minutes will be provided for transferring the answer to the answer sheets.

Speaking

In the speaking section examiner takes in person interview. There are 3 exercises in the speaking section. In the first section examiner ask number of questions on the every day and familiar topic such as hobbies, preferences. In the last two exercises general topics are included based on booklets. The students need to discuss and they shoold answer the detailed question. The total time allocated for speaking is 11-14 minutes where first part takes 4-5 minutes, second part takes 3-4 minutes and last part takes 4-5 minutes.

Reading

In the IELTS academic reading evaluation variety of passages with varying difficolty will be assigned to the students .The topic are academic topics but intended for the non specialists person. The reading passage can be either argumentative or it's descriptive. There will be 40 questions in total and each of passage includes 12 to 14 questions. The total question variety will be 11 which include moltiple choices, identifying writer's claim, and identifying information, matching headings, matching information, matching sentence endings, matching features, chart completion, sentence completion, short answer and labeling diagram. No additional time will be allocated for transferring the answer to the answer sheet.
Whereas in case of General training examination the subject matter differs than that of the academic IELTS. The total timing for this section is 1 hour and the total number of questions is 40 questions. The weight age of the questions is same in both the cases. The general training has assigned number of questions for each reading passage.

Writing

IELTS academic writing includes 2 writing tasks which are timed separately. On the writing task one student are anticipated to complete a 150 words essay graph, chart, diagram or the information including visual representation. The students are assigned total 20 minutes of time for the task one. In the task 2 students need to compose 250 words essay which may be either comparing or contrasting the given ideas, challenging the views raised by essay prompt, proposing the solution to the problem indicated in the topic. For task two the allocated time is 40 minutes and the score of this section is weighted towards the second essay which counts twice as much as the first.
General training have same timing and the structure is also same as that of the academic .The first writing task is writing a response to the letter in the given situation. The second task is the discursive essay which is worth twice as much as the first essay.