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IELTS is designed to test whether your English ability is sufficient for university study. You have to be able to read and understand academic material and to be able to write a well structured academic essay. It is difficult to anticipate topics so you must develop strategies for coping with unfamiliar topics and vocabulary. I suggest that you read,read,read ... newspaper articles, news magazines, science magazines and any other popular but serious material you can lay your hands on. Don't expect to understand everything and don't laboriously look up every word you don't know. That would be hard work and tedious. Learning to guess from context is an important skill. You should also listen as much as possible to things like radio documentaries and discussions. Practise writing essays, take an issue you are familiar with and discuss it from two points of view. Plan an essay of four to five paragraphs. The first paragraph will clearly outline the points covered in your essay. The middle paragraphs will begin by introducing one of those points each and then will discuss it. The final paragraph will summarise the points discussed, it will not introduce new material. For vocabulary building I suggest you keep a notebook for collecting new and familiar words according to topics such as 'farming',' the environment', 'bridge building', 'education' etc. If you have access to IELTS practise tests, do as many as you can lay your hands on and if they have answers, correct them yourself. Don't waste time trying to memorize answers, your chances of guessing appropriate topics are very slim. Finally, read and write in your own language, the better your general knowledge and the more you know about a topic in your own language, the easier it will be to cope with in English.

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