How to read long and difficult sentences in IELTS

If you want to conquer IELTS, you must first conquer IELTS reading; if you want to conquer IELTS reading, you must first conquer the long and difficult sentences in IELTS. Let’s talk about how to read long and difficult sentences in IELTS, don’t miss it.

1. Learn from? Special symbols?

Special symbols that often appear in IELTS reading are dashes, quotation marks, colons, and brackets. In most cases, the text between two dashes or two commas is called an insert; the insert element is an explanation of the preceding information.

In addition, the content after the colon also serves as a comment.

Such as: Sometimes it's slow: vast bubbles of magma-molten rock from the mantle-inch towards the surface, coolingslowly, to show through as granite extrusions (ason Skye, or the Great WhinSill, thelavadykesqueezedoutliketoothpastethatcarriespartofHadrian'sWallinnorthernEngland).

Magma;mantle and granite are confusing. In fact, if you can see a special symbol "colon" after ?itisslow?, then look at the information after the colon: the key point of this sentence is "vastbubblesofmagma".

2. Search for key information with conjunctions

The articles you read are full of logical relationships, such as progression, transition, comparison, etc. Most of them are followed by key points.

Such as: Museumsusedtolook-andsomestilldo-muchlikestorageroomsofobjectspackedtogetherinshowcases:goodforscholarswhowantedtostudythesubtledifferencesindesign,butnotfortheordinaryvisitor,towhomitalllookedalike.

The colon is the key message and appears after ?showcases?. If you read further, a turning conjunction (but) and the removal of the non-limiting attributive clause will not affect the meaning and logic of the main clause. So the key message is butnotfortheordinaryvisitor.

3. Use object clauses

If words such as how, suggest, and display appear in a long sentence. These words are often followed by object clauses.

Such as InNorway, afteraninterventioncampaignwasintroducednationally, evaluationofforty-twoschoolssuggestedthat,overatwo-yearperiod,bullyingwashalved.

Although this sentence contains a bunch of commas, you can skip InNorway and the adverbial clause introduced by ?after?. You can see the "suggestthat" object clause, which means the key information follows.

The time period is not the focus, so you can skip it directly, and then you will find that the three words "bullyingwashalved" will be left in this sentence.