In a general reading test, careful reading is an indispensible strategy for test takers to make inferences, such as to identify the writer’s views and some other detailed information (Hughes, 2000: 139). For example, to infer the meaning of an unknown word from context; to make propositional informational inferences, answering questions beginning with “who”, “when” and “what”; to make propositional explanatory inferences concerned with motivation, cause and consequence, answering questions beginning with “why”, “how”; to make pragmatic inference, which are those where test takers have to combine information from the text with knowledge from outside the text, etc.
In the IELTS reading test, for the purpose of providing the correct answer to each ques