The most costly mistake on an English exam is not missing vocabulary. It is trying to translate. Translating means reading twice: once to convert and once to understand. On a timed exam, that is time you do not have.

Examiners do not care whether you can translate, either. The questions test comprehension: main idea, the author's intent, inference. You can get every answer right without understanding every word of the text — and that is exactly what well-prepared students do.

Read the question before the text

It sounds backwards, but it is the step that saves the most time. By reading the question first, you enter the text knowing what to look for, and your brain starts filtering instead of processing everything with the same weight.

Use the title and the source

Exam texts almost always come with a reference: magazine, newspaper, website, year. A text from Scientific American and a personal blog post call for different readings, and the source already hints at the tone and intent — to inform, to criticize, to persuade.

Anchor yourself in true cognates

Portuguese, Spanish and English share a great deal of vocabulary of Latin origin, especially in academic and journalistic texts. Analysis, evidence, consequence, social, economic — these words give themselves away and form the skeleton of the meaning.

The necessary caution: false cognates. But they are few and well known, and you can study the list once.

Identify the connectors

This is the most underrated skill. Connectors tell you where the argument is going, even when you do not understand the whole sentence:

However, although, nevertheless signal contrast — what comes next contradicts what came before. Therefore, thus, as a result signal a conclusion. Moreover, furthermore add more of the same.

Just by mapping the connectors you rebuild the structure of the argument, and many inference questions are solved right there.

Accept not understanding some words

Students freeze when they meet an unknown word and reread the same passage three times. Keep going: the context almost always reveals the meaning a few lines later. If it does not, that word was probably not needed to answer.

Go back to the text to confirm

After choosing an answer, find the passage in the text that supports it. If you cannot point to where it is, you probably answered on impression — and impressions are exactly what the examiners' distractors exploit.

How to train

Strategic reading is a habit, and habits are built through corrected repetition. Doing past exams on your own helps; doing past exams and reviewing every wrong answer until you understand why the right option is right — that is what changes your score.