IELTS Academic 16, by Cambridge University Press

This is the sort of book that is hard to review but easy enough to appreciate it if you happen to be in the target audience for it. And this book’s title makes it clear what that audience is–those who are taking the IELTS Academic exam and want practice exams. That what this book offers, nothing more and nothing less. No one is going to want to read this book for fun, it offers no literary value, and its material is extremely straightforward and focused on helping candidates practice their IELTS exams. If you are in that group of people, this is likely a book that you (or your tutor/teacher) has on their radar, if not, this is a book that is not really going to interest to you all that much. For the remainder of this review, though, I am going to talk about what this book provides to its readers, and that is a no fills, no waste, no filler book that is laser focused on providing sample test questions to its readers.

In terms of its contents, this book is about 150 pages long. It begins with an introduction that compares the General and Academic formats of the test, beginning with listening sections, reading and writing (which differ between the two in content but not in time), and speaking, then discussing the sections of the Academic test format, the scoring of the test, marking the test, and interpreting one’s scores. This is followed by four practice tests that take up 90 pages or so of material. All of the tests are organized the same way. First comes the listening section. Part one of listening has ten questions, part two has ten questions, part three has ten questions, and part four has ten questions as well. After this comes the reading section with three reading passages that take up 40 questions. This is followed by two sections of the writing section, the first task involving some sort of graph or chart or drawing, and the second involving an essay question. This is followed by a prompt for the speaking section of the test, which also has three parts. After the four practice tests, the book contains audioscripts, listening and reading answer keys, sample writing answers, sample answer sheets, and then acknowledgements.