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Simone Braverman

Simone Braverman is the founder of IELTS-Blog.com and the author of several renowned IELTS preparation books, including Ace the IELTS, Target Band 7, the High Scorer's Choice practice test series, and IELTS Success Formula. Since 2005, Simone has been committed to making IELTS preparation accessible and effective through her books and online resources. Her work has helped 100,000's of students worldwide achieve their target scores and live their dream lives. When Simone isn't working on her next IELTS book, video lesson, or coaching, she enjoys playing the guitar or rollerblading.

IELTS tips from Daria, Band 8 in Academic Module

I’ve received tons of emails asking me the same question: “How did these people (our results competition winners) achieve such a good scores?”. And here is the answer – Daria Kurokhtina, who won the IELTS results competition in March with a jaw-dropping score of 8.0, shares her experience:

“My experience of IELTS preparation is not standard because I had only a week before exam for that.

I decided to use this restricted time frame for making myself familiar with the format of Reading and Listening parts. For that purpose I used IELTS past papers published by Cambridge University Press. I worked through all the available past papers, analysed my mistakes and thought about ways to avoid them in actual examination conditions.

As for Speaking and Writing parts, unfortunately I didn’t have any opportunities for practicing these skills with experienced IELTS tutors so I relied only on the techniques acquired when studying English at school and at the university.

My main piece of advice for candidates with limited time for preparation would be therefore to concentrate on the parts of the exam that they feel can be significantly improved in the short term.

Good luck to all the candidates! Best wishes to you and your extremely useful web-site!”

IELTS Results competition winners in April 2010

Today is the day many of you have been waiting for – finally we can announce who won the IELTS results competition in April. But just before revealing who the winners are, I’d like to say something.

New people come and join IELTS-Blog every month – in fact, we get thousands of new members monthly – and many of them probably have no idea WHY we have this traditional monthly competition where the best IELTS result wins. The reason is simple – to find people who prepared to IELTS successfully on their own and to ask them these questions:

“How did you study to get such a high score? What are the secrets of your success?”

And why do you care? Because success can be replicated. You can learn from other people, just like you, who achieved a great IELTS score, by studying like they did. This is why I hope that today’s winners will write back to me and share their tips for every test takers’ sake.

And the winners are …

Victor Machevsky from Ukraine, Band 8.5 in Academic module

Lovedeep Wadhwa from India, Band 7.5 in General Training module

Congratulations, my dear winners! Your special certificates – the evidence of your triumph – are on their way to your emails, and your results will be displayed in IELTS-Blog hall of fame.

We would love it if you shared your methods of studying that enabled you to achieve these remarkable Band scores. Please send us an email to IELTS-Blog and share.