Hello to all the lovely readers of IELTS-Blog.com – this is Simone and today I have exciting news for everyone. Many of you have been writing to me and asking for more practice tests, saying that you have finished all the tests you had and need more.
Today I am finally ready to announce the brand new 15 complete IELTS practice tests we put together especially for you (there are 15 of General Training, and 15 of Academic module). They took months of work, because we wanted to do a really good job for you, and because we wanted to introduce some new helpful features that we knew you’ll love.
You may remember that a month ago I wrote about the third edition of my books ‘Target Band 7’ and ‘Ace the IELTS’, that was just released, and that now a full practice test is included in each book. From today and on, you have 15 more brand new IELTS practice tests! But enough with the excitement, let me tell you what’s inside.
The practice tests begin with a ‘How To’ section, explaining you the two ways you can use them to practice – step by step. Take this as a starting point, to get you moving in the right direction.
These practice tests are great for simulating the real exam, or just for normal practicing. They have 4 sub-tests (Listening, Reading, Writing, Speaking), there are high-quality recordings for the Listening part, and there are also transcripts for all the recordings, with answers underlined. So if your Listening skill needs some work you can play a recording, follow it using a transcript to understand every word, and you will also see where the answers are ‘hiding’. Of course, in addition we provide all the answers on a separate Answer Sheet and you don’t need to go over transcripts just to check your own answers.
In these tests we also included blank printable Answer Sheets that you can use to practice in copying your answers from the question booklet onto the Answer Sheet – this, too, is a skill that can be improved with a little work.
Another useful feature is the Reading Answers Help – and we thought of it thanks to you! Often people are not convinced that the correct answer in the Reading answer key is, indeed, correct. Other times people see the correct answer but don’t understand where it came from. We created a complete section that explains all the Reading Answers and shows you the sentences or paragraphs in texts where they came from. This will surely help you understand the logic of the Reading section of the exam, and once you have finished a test, you will be able to fully analyse your answers and see where you went wrong, and why – very important for doing better in the next practice test! This will definitely help you make progress.
To help you improve your Writing, we included model responses written by an Examiner for all writing tasks. They are a good reference in terms of structure, tone (formal/informal), expressions and vocabulary, and they give you something to aim for.
For the Speaking sub-test we have a real treat for you – in addition to full Speaking tests (questions) we have recorded real interviews where the Examiner asks test takers questions, just like in a real Speaking test. Every such recording also has a written Examiner’s Commentary which tells you about the strong and weak sides of each test taker, what they did well, what could have been better, and it finishes with a marking section, where each student gets a score in 4 criteria (Fluency and Coherence, Lexical Resource, Grammatical Range and Accuracy, and Pronunciation) and an overall Speaking Band score. After listening to such recording and reading its report you’ll understand how you measure up against that student’s level, and guess your own score in the real exam. The students’ levels range from Band 5 to Band 9, so you’ll get an example of all the various levels.
The practice tests are digital, in PDF format, and the recordings are in mp3, which makes the packages mobile- and tablet-friendly (study on the go!), and they are also fully printable in high resolution.
Please visit this page to download them today – and start practicing without delay!
P.S. If you have purchased any of my e-books (‘Target Band 7’, ‘Ace the IELTS’ or ‘IELTS Success Formula’) and received practice tests with them, these are different from the newly released tests. You can safely purchase these new test sets, and have another 15 tests to do.
