The practice tests start with a ‘How To’ section, explaining the steps to practicing. You will see there are two possible ways you can use these practice tests: they are great for simulating the real exam, or for normal practicing.

Just like in the real IELTS test, there are 4 sub-tests (Listening, Reading, Writing, Speaking). We produced high-quality recordings for the Listening part, and there are also transcripts for all the recordings, with answers underlined. If Listening is a challenge, you can play a recording, follow it using a transcript to understand every word, and you will also see where the answers are located in sentences. Of course, in addition we provide all the answers on a separate Answer Sheet and you don’t have to read transcripts if you only want the correct answers.

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.

A new, useful feature is the Reading Answers Help. At times students can’t understand the reason why our correct answers are, indeed, correct. We created a complete section that explains all the Reading Answers and shows you the sentences or paragraphs in texts where they can be found. Using Reading Answers Help you will be able to understand the logic of the Reading section of the exam. After finishing a test, you will be able to fully analyse your answers.

Similarly to the previous practice tests, we included model responses written by an Examiner for all writing tasks.

For the Speaking sub-test in addition to Speaking tests’ questions we have recorded live interviews with the Examiner asking test takers questions. Every recording comes with a written Examiner’s Commentary that explores the strong and weak sides of each test taker, their strengths and weaknesses, what could have been done better, and at the end there is 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. Listening to such recording and reading the Examiner’s Commentary will help you compare their performance to your own, and estimate your Speaking score in the real IELTS test. The students’ levels range from IELTS Band 5 to Band 9.

The practice tests are digital, in PDF format, and the recordings are in mp3, which makes the packages mobile- and tablet-friendly (you can study while commuting!), and they are also fully printable in high resolution.

Back to Blog

This will also suit our plan of launching a tablet application, as again listening and reading are the formats that can most successfully be transferred interactively to the digital format.

Right now, listening tests 16 to 25 are in the proof reading stage and tests 26 to 30 are in the writing stage. We hope that listening tests 16 to 30 will be written and proofread by the coming Christmas, so that the recordings can be done in time for a release at Easter 2014. This timetable should be attainable if things continue as they have been doing. As they won’t be full IELTS practice tests, they will at first be only released on the sister sites in an interactive format, or be made available to our partners around the world.

We will keep you informed of our progress regularly.

Back to Blog

Kasia met Robbie in London in July 2008. Robbie, a cricket fanatic, was at Lord’s cricket ground watching England versus South Africa and met Kasia whilst ordering a coffee. From there, the couple met regularly until Kasia took the plunge of going to Germany to be with Robbie. While in Germany, Kasia became a qualified teacher and worked with Robbie at Dresden International School.

Four years after their meeting, Robbie proposed in San Sebastian, Spain, one morning on a swimming platform. After an awkward moment while Robbie extricated the ring from his swimming shorts, the penny dropped and accepted the proposal after some shock and surprise!

Back now in Germany, Kasia is back at the school, while Robbie is working on ieltshelpnow.com’s promotion and of course IELTS practice tests writing. He has already completed a further five IELTS listening tests and is now working on a further ten. Fifteen further IELTS practice tests listening module are planned to be released at Easter 2014.

Back to Blog

We plan to further extend our IELTS practice tests offerings and a further 5 listening tests have also been written and are in the proof reading stage. 10 more listening tests will be completed and eventually the target of 30 full IELTS practice tests will be achieved and available on our IELTS practice tests website.

Back to Blog

First the similarities. Both have 40 questions and both last for one hour. They both use similar types of question (which will be explored in a later article). That’s it.

The academic reading test has 3 main reading texts with around 13 or 14 questions assigned to each part. The question types vary, but some types come more than once. The articles are of general though academic interest and at least one will have some form of logical argument to it.

The general training reading test also has 3 sections. Section 1 though has two or three texts and one text here may comprise of shorter texts, eg a series of advertisement on a similar topic. Section 1 is aimed at survival in an English speaking context. Section 2’s subject focuses on the training and work environments and here there will be 2 texts and they will be longer than section 1. Section 3 is a single longer text in the style of the ones found when doing the academic reading test. All 3 sections in the general training reading text also have 13 or 14 questions assigned to them.

I hope this has clarified the differences between these 2 reading tests. Our IELTS practice tests fully reflect these styles of test.

Back to Blog

Naturally though, it would be silly to buy IELTS practice tests that were not the module that you were taking. This article will therefore examine the IELTS writing tests, so that the differences between the academic and general training modules are clear.

The IELTS academic module writing consists of two tasks. The first task should take around 20 minutes to complete. Students will get some kind of pictorial or graphical information an they will have to write a report for a university teacher on the information. Task 1 should be no fewer than 150 words. Task 2 is an essay of not fewer than 250 words. The essay questions will be of a general though mildly academic nature.

The IELTS general training module also consists of two tasks. The first task requires the student to write a letter in response to a certain given situation. Again, the first task should take around 20 minutes to complete and it should be no fewer than 150 words. Like the academic module, Task 2 is an essay of not fewer than 250 words. The essay questions will be of a general nature.

Find help on all elements of the IELTS writing tests HERE.

Our IELTS practice tests provide realistic IELTS style questions for both tasks for the academic and general training modules. We also provide model example essays for all our questions, so that students can see one excellent way of answering the questions.

In our next article, we will look at the academic and general training reading tests and our IELTS practice tests on these.

Back to Blog

First of all, which module candidates take is wholly up to the institution that requires them to take IELTS. In very general terms, the academic module is for those people who wish to study in an institution that conducts its course in English. The general training module is for those people who wish to emigrate to an English speaking country, such as New Zealand, Australia, Canada, the US and the UK. These, however are very general guidelines, and there are plenty of exceptions. For example, a candidate may wish to emigrate, but her or his field of work may be medical, and those working in a medical field are often requested to take the academic module. As explained above, if you’re not sure then it is the institution that requires you to take IELTS that should be able to tell you which module they require.

In terms of the IELTS practice tests, the listening and speaking sections of IELTS and of course our IELTS practice tests are the same. The difference lies in the reading and the writing modules. As this is just a short article, I won’t go into it in this piece, but I will address the differences later in the week.

Back to Blog

Over the next 2 weeks, the new IELTS practice tests will be correctly formatted and then added to our existing product. We hope therefore that the new IELTS practice tests will be available for sale at the end of these 2 weeks. Following this, we will also upload the new IELTS practice tests to our sister website, so that we can continue to develop that site as well.

As promised, this is just a short announcement article, but we will be back with more IELTS related articles in the coming week.

Back to Blog

The implications for IELTS practice tests providers are clear. As well as a greater online market developing, there are now more and more institutions developing in order to teach IELTS. These institutions provide an extra market for ieltshelpnow.com and her online sister website and it is this market that we are addressing with our new set of IELTS practice tests.

As advertised recently, our new IELTS practice tests are just waiting for the listening recordings corrections and new IELTS practice tests (tests 16 to 20) have now been commissioned. In the very near future, we will be searching for institutions as partners to use our IELTS practice tests at a low annual fee, so that they can have a variety of practice options at a reasonable price.

The new tests will be ready very, very soon, so watch this space!

Back to Blog

A lot of demand for new tests come from the continued explosion in the popularity of IELTS. When ieltshelpnow start out, there were approximately 280,000 people doing the tests. Now there are easily a million more tests done every year. With the amount of candidates increasing, there has been a corresponding increase in the number of establishments training people in IELTS. One of the targets of ieltshelpnow over the next year will be to work with these training centres with supplying their IELTS practice tests requirement.

Hopefully we will have good news soon about tests 11 to 15 coming online!

Back to Blog