 Chris here from IELTS Advantage and in 2021 I did the real IELTS reading test and I got a band nine but I did it in about 20 minutes. I think it was 21 or 22 minutes. So I thought about making a video where I would take a real reading test and kind of go through it and show you how I did it quickly but I thought this might not really help you because that would be showing you the how, how I did it, what you really need to know and what will help you improve your own reading score is the why. Why did I get a band nine in 20, 25 minutes and then you can learn from this. So I'm going to outline five things that I do very differently from most students and what my band nine students also do differently. Now the obvious answer is I'm a native English speaker. I'm an IELTS teacher. Of course I'm going to get a band nine. That's nothing to celebrate. That's nothing to brag about. If I didn't get a band nine then something would be seriously wrong but that doesn't mean that we can't learn from that and understand exactly why that happened so that you can get the score that you need and finish the test in record time and I'm also going to give you a little bonus at the end that's going to help you do that. So the first thing that I do and all of my band nine reading students do is we read or listen to English every day. It is impossible to get a band nine in listening or reading or writing or speaking unless you're actually doing that thing on a daily basis and the key really is that it is a habit. How do you develop a habit? Well you develop a habit by doing something you enjoy. So me I enjoy reading books about business and about leadership but also books about spy novels and things like that. I love reading those things so I do that every single day. The key thing that you should develop is the habit of reading or listening to English on a daily basis and listen to something or read something you enjoy. Even if it's just for two to five minutes or ten minutes a day that is going to dramatically improve two, three, four and five. So obviously I and the other band nine students have a very wide vocabulary. We're not spending time looking at words and thinking about the meaning of words but more importantly we're not getting lost. So if there are words in the question or the text that you don't understand you're probably going to get lost. That's going to waste a huge amount of time and it's going to lead to incorrect answers. So the wider your vocabulary the better your score is going to be. How do you improve your vocabulary? Well read or listen to English every day and follow our vocabulary improvement plan. I'll leave a link in the description where you can click on that and get the vocabulary improvement plan for free. Number three is all about skills. So what are these? These are things like skimming, scanning but most importantly close reading. So we use skimming to kind of generally understand the text and the key there is quickly. So skimming it helps us understand okay what's the general meaning of each paragraph and the text in general. This makes it much easier to scan for the location of the correct answer but scanning just gives us the location of the correct answer close reading reading the part that contains the correct answer very closely and understanding it in detail. That's what gives us the correct answer. I'll put a link somewhere in the video or the description on how you can improve your skills but the bonus will also help you with your skills. Number four is all about strategy. So there are more than 10 different types of IELTS reading question. So there are 10 or more types and Band 9 students have a different strategy for each. If you are trying to apply the same strategy to 10 different types of questions you're going to get lost you're going to waste time and you're going to get lots of incorrect answers. If you have a separate strategy and you have applied those strategies in your preparation time and you know exactly what to do it makes everything much much easier and much much faster. Strategy not only helps you find the correct answer it helps you find it in the quickest possible time. More on how you can improve your strategy in the bonus. Number five is all about weaknesses. Nobody including me just does our IELTS reading test for the first time and gets every single question correct. In fact official data from IELTS.org states that and we'll can put it on the video what the exact score average score for English speakers is for reading but I think it's around a seven which is incredibly low for a native English speaker. But what I and the other Band 9 students did was we did some practice questions and then we analyzed our incorrect answers. So let's say there are five questions let's keep it simple you might get this one right this one right this one right this one right but this one wrong. The key difference between someone getting a Band 9 and other students is the Band 9 students will focus on this and they will understand the why why did they get this wrong is it because of reading skills is it because of strategy is it because of vocabulary or is it something else. For me I was always getting a few questions wrong because of focus. I really struggle to focus on things for long periods of time especially if they are boring and IELTS practice tests are incredibly boring so I had to tell myself you really need to focus on this or you're going to get some questions wrong not because your English is bad or your reading skills or your vocabulary is bad but just because of focus and for you it could be something completely different but what I did was I understood my weakness I then worked on that weakness turned it into a strength and I was able to then go on and get the score that I needed. For more information on the process of how we do that I'll put a link to a video where I explained that in a lot more detail so those are the kind of the five reasons why I was able to get a Band 9 in just 20 minutes and why my other Band 9 students were able to get a Band 9 and then move on with their lives and not have to worry about the silly IELTS test anymore. Your bonus I'm going to give you a free reading course. Click the link below and you can gain instant access to this reading course for free. We will soon be removing all of our free courses so make sure you sign up before we remove those reading courses. I hope that you enjoyed this video and if you need more information check out the rest of the channel or go to IELTSAdvantage.com where you'll find lots of helpful stuff.