Part 1: Reading Correspondence
One personal message, eleven questions, and two completely different reading jobs wearing one coat. The order rule handles the first six; the reply needs something else.
What Part 1 puts on the screen
Part 1 opens the reading section with a single personal message: a letter or an email from one named person to another, usually 300 to 400 words, always about something ordinary. Somebody has moved city, taken a job, cancelled a plan or inherited a problem. The message stays on the left of the screen for the whole part, so you never have to hunt for it again.
Eleven questions follow, in two blocks. Questions 1 to 6 are sentence stems, each with a drop-down of four options. Questions 7 to 11 are five blanks inside a short reply written back to the sender by the person who received the message. You get about 10 minutes for all eleven, which is roughly 55 seconds a question, the tightest per-question ratio in the section on paper.
The two blocks look similar and are not. The first block asks what the message says and implies, walking down it from top to bottom. The second block asks you to reconstruct a conversation: given what this person wrote, what would a sensible reply to them contain. Same source text, different task, and the second one is slower.
Pass one: the message, read as a message
Read the letter once, properly, before you look at any question. Ninety seconds is enough for 350 words at a comfortable pace, and it is the best ninety seconds you will spend in the part.
The reason is that Part 1 messages hide most of their meaning in implication rather than statement. A letter writer does not tell you they are worried about their brother. They mention him in one sentence, describe that sentence as the hardest one to write, and move on to the weather. Several of the eleven questions are built on exactly that kind of move, and you cannot scan for an implication, because the words you would scan for are not there.
While you read, notice three things without writing anything down. Who is writing and who is receiving. What the writer wants from the recipient, if anything. And where the tone changes, because a shift from cheerful to careful almost always marks the paragraph that several questions are drawn from.
Resist the temptation to read twice. A second read feels productive and is where the part starts to run late. One proper read plus targeted returns beats two hurried reads, every time.
Pass two: ride the order in questions 1 to 6
Questions 1 to 6 track the message from top to bottom. Question 1 lives in the opening. Question 6 lives near the close. This is a structural property of the part and you should lean on it hard.
The practical effect is that each question tells you roughly where to look, so a return to the text is a glance at one paragraph rather than a search of the whole letter. That converts a ten minute part into something closer to six, and the saved minutes are what pay for the reply.
The order rule also works as an error detector. If you find yourself back in paragraph two for question 5, something has gone wrong. Either you have misread the stem, or you have latched onto a detail that appears twice in the message and picked the wrong occurrence. Go back to the stem before you go back to the letter.
One caution: the order rule places the answer, it does not choose it. Most wrong options in Part 1 are true statements taken from the message and wired to the wrong question. Having found the right paragraph, you still have to check that the option answers the stem in front of you rather than merely agreeing with the text somewhere.
Read the reply straight through with every blank still empty before you choose anything. Later sentences settle earlier blanks far more often than candidates expect, and the reply is short enough that the read costs about twenty seconds.
Pass three: the reply, and why it is the slower half
Questions 7 to 11 show you a text you have never seen: a short reply, written back to the original sender, with five drop-down blanks in it. It is new prose, and this is where candidates lose the part.
The structural fact that decides your score here is that the reply never contains its own answers. It was written by somebody who read the original message, and the facts they relied on have been cut out and replaced with drop-downs. What remains is the shape of an answer: a sentence with a hole, and the hole can only be filled with something the original message supports.
So the method is mechanical. Read the whole reply straight through with the blanks still empty, before choosing anything. Later sentences routinely settle earlier blanks, and a blank filled from the six words in front of it is a blank filled by luck. Then, for each blank, find the specific line in the original message that constrains it. If you cannot point at a line, you are guessing from the reply, and the reply was written to make guessing feel reasonable.
Budget accordingly. Roughly four and a half of your ten minutes belong to these five questions, which is more per question than the six stems get. Most candidates split the part the other way round and then run the reply at a sprint.
For every reply blank, point at the line in the original message that forces it. If you cannot find that line, you are answering from the reply, which is the text that was built to mislead you.
How the wrong options are built here
Picture the test writer's problem. They need three convincing wrong options for a blank in a reply, and the cheapest way to build one is to reach into the original message and lift a real detail out of it. So the aunt mentioned once becomes an option. The broken washing machine becomes an option. Every wrong answer is a genuine thing from a genuine sentence, dropped into a slot it does not belong in.
That is why the question is this true? is useless in Part 1, and the question does this fit here? is decisive. Three of your four options will usually survive the first test. Only one survives the second.
A second family of distractors swaps the person. The message says the writer's partner is reluctant about the move; an option says the writer is reluctant. Both people exist, the reluctance exists, and only the pairing is wrong. Reading a letter fast produces exactly this error, because tone attaches to the letter as a whole rather than to the sentence it came from.
A third family overstates. The message says the writer is thinking about applying; the option says the writer has decided to apply. Nothing false has been added, only a degree of certainty the text does not carry. Watch for options containing words like decided, refused, always and never against a message that hedged.
Why an easy text is not an easy part
Part 1 has the friendliest text in the section. A personal letter about moving to Halifax is easier to follow than a chart, a technical passage or a municipal argument, and candidates finish reading it feeling confident.
It is not the easiest part to score on. The message carries most of its weight in tone and implication rather than in stated fact, which means fast literal readers often do worse here than slow careful ones. It is the one part of the section where reading more slowly is likely to raise your score.
If Part 1 is your weakest part, the diagnosis is usually one of three things. You skimmed instead of reading, so the implications went past. You distrusted the order rule, so you reread the message six times and arrived at the reply with no clock left. Or you answered from the reply, so the distractors did exactly what they were built to do. Each has a different fix, and guessing which one applies to you is worth more than another hour of general practice.
Give questions 7 to 11 more of your ten minutes than questions 1 to 6. The stems ride the order of the message and go quickly; the reply does not and will not.
Practise it
Five questions on the correspondence part: its structure, its order rule, and the way its wrong options are manufactured.