True, False, Not Given: the reading question people lose most marks on

Ask a room of IELTS candidates which reading question type they fear and a large share will name True, False, Not Given before you finish the sentence. They are right to. Across the reading papers we review, it is the type where able readers, people who clearly understood the passage, still bleed marks they should have kept. The comprehension is fine. The decision rule is not.

That is the thing to hold on to from the start. This is not really a reading problem. It is a rules problem wearing a reading problem's clothes, and once you learn the rule the questions stop being frightening and start being almost mechanical.

Those figures are our estimate from marking practice papers rather than an official statistic, so treat them as a shape rather than a measurement. But the shape is consistent: roughly four in five wrong answers live on the False versus Not Given line. True is comparatively safe. That tells you exactly where an hour of practice earns its keep.

The one rule that fixes most of it

Here is the whole thing. True means the passage says the same as the statement. False means the passage says the opposite of the statement, it contradicts it. Not Given means the passage does not settle the matter at all, in either direction. The trap is that False and Not Given feel similar from the inside, because in both cases you did not find the statement confirmed. But they are opposites of each other: False is a contradiction present in the text, and Not Given is an absence of any information.

The three ways good readers still go wrong

The first is importing your own knowledge. The passage discusses a topic you happen to know something about, the statement matches what you know, so you mark it True, even though the passage never said it. IELTS is testing the passage, not your general knowledge. If it is not in the text, your being right about the world does not earn the mark.

The second is over-thinking Not Given into False. A cautious reader feels that Not Given is a cop-out, that surely the examiner wants a firmer answer, so they talk themselves into False. Not Given is a real, common, correct answer. Roughly a third of the statements on a typical set are Not Given by design. Trust it.

The third is missing a qualifier. The passage says some researchers argue and the statement says all researchers argue. That single word flips a True to a False, because the passage now contradicts the statement's scope. The words all, only, always, never, most and some are where these questions hide their teeth.

The ordering rule in step two is underused. Because the statements follow the sequence of the passage, a statement you cannot locate is often Not Given precisely because it is not there to be found. If you have found questions one and three and cannot find two anywhere between them, that is itself evidence.

How to practise it

Do not practise reading. You can already read. Practise the decision. Take a set of True, False, Not Given questions and, for every one you get wrong, write a single line saying which of the three errors above you made. Within a couple of weeks the pattern is obvious, usually the same one error repeating, and once you can name your habit you can catch it in the exam. This is a smaller, more targeted job than most people make of it.

There is nothing clever here, which is the point. Learn one rule, name your own error, and trust Not Given when the text is silent. The type that frightens the room turns out to be the most learnable of the lot.