IELTS Reading matching information, features and sentence endings

Matching headings asks you for the gist of a paragraph. The three tasks in this guide ask for something more precise: a specific detail, a specific person’s view, or a specific cause or effect. They look alike on the page because each one ends in a letter, but they are searched and checked differently, and mixing up the methods is what costs the marks.

Three tasks that look alike

IELTS.org lists matching information, matching features and matching sentence endings as three of the eleven Academic Reading question types, alongside matching headings. In all of them the work is to link something from the question to something in the passage. What differs is what you search for, how many times an option can appear, and whether the order of the text helps you.

Matching information

What it asks. You are given statements such as “a reason why a scheme was stopped” or “a comparison between two methods”, and you write the letter of the paragraph that contains that information. The passage’s paragraphs are labelled with letters.

What differs. It tests detail, not main idea. A paragraph can contain the information without being about it. IELTS.org’s format page states no text order for this type, so treat each statement as a separate search and do not assume that the answers run from the top of the passage to the bottom. IELTS.org states that some paragraphs or sections may be used more than once, so a repeated letter is not a mistake in itself.

Method.

1. Read the statement and decide what kind of information it wants: a reason, an example, a definition, a comparison, a date, a cause, a result.
2. Skim each paragraph for that kind of information, not for a copied keyword. The statement is paraphrased.
3. When a paragraph looks right, find the exact sentence and check that it gives the information the statement names, not just its topic.
4. Move to the next statement. Leave a hard one and return to it, because each paragraph you rule out narrows the search.

Worked example (invented). Suppose paragraph B says “The scheme ended in 2015, and council records show that it had run for nine years.” Paragraph D says “The council gave two reasons: rising costs and too few volunteers.” The statement is “a reason the scheme was stopped”. The word “ended” pulls you towards B, but B says when it ended and for how long. D says why. The answer is D.

Traps. The keyword that sits in the wrong paragraph; the paragraph that names the topic but not the specific item; and the paragraph that gives a similar but different piece of information, such as an effect when the statement asks for a cause.

Matching features

What it asks. You are given statements and a list of options such as researchers, dates, organisations or theories. You decide which option each statement belongs to.

What differs. IELTS.org states that some options may not be used and that others may be used more than once. That is the rule that separates this task from matching headings, where no heading can be reused. It also means you should never choose an answer just because an option has not appeared yet.

Method.

1. Read the list of options first, so you know what to look for.
2. Scan the passage and mark every mention of each option. Names and dates stand out, which makes this quicker than most tasks.
3. Read around each mention to see what is attributed to it.
4. Match each statement to the option whose attributed view or action says the same thing in different words.

Worked example (invented). The passage says: “Mendes argued that the decline was caused by pollution. Hall, by contrast, blamed overfishing, while Okoye said both factors mattered.” The options are A Mendes, B Hall and C Okoye. “The decline was due to fishing” is B. “Two causes combined to produce the decline” is C. “Pollution was the main cause” is A. If a fourth statement also described Hall’s view, B could be used again.

Traps. Two people whose views are similar, with only one of them holding the exact view in the statement; a person mentioned several times with different roles, so that the first mention is not the relevant one; and a view that the writer reports only to reject it, which belongs to that person but is not the writer’s own.

Matching sentence endings

What it asks. You are given the first half of several sentences and a longer list of possible endings. You join each beginning to the ending that completes it according to the passage.

What differs. It is the one of the three where IELTS.org gives you help with order. The format page says the sentence beginnings are in the same order as the information in the text, and that there are more endings than beginnings, so you will not use all of them. You can work through the passage once, from top to bottom, instead of searching it afresh for each item.

Method.

1. Read the first beginning and find where the passage deals with it. The next beginning will be after that point.
2. Before looking at the endings, predict what the passage says. This stops a plausible ending from steering you.
3. Choose the ending that matches the passage in meaning and also fits the beginning in grammar.
4. Cross out the ending you use, and move forward.

Worked example (invented). The passage says: “The earliest telescopes used a single lens, which bent different colours of light by different amounts and produced blurred coloured edges. Later designers replaced the main lens with a curved mirror, which avoids this problem.” The beginnings are 1 “Early telescopes were limited because …” and 2 “Later designers improved them by …”. The endings are A “the lenses produced blurred colours”, B “using a mirror in place of the main lens”, C “building them in cold climates” and D “the nights were too short”. The answers are 1 A and 2 B. Ending D fits the grammar of beginning 1 and might be true in real life, but the passage says nothing about the length of the nights, so it is a distractor.

Traps. Two endings that both fit the grammar, where only one matches the passage; an ending that is true in general but unsupported by the text; and an ending that repeats a word from the passage but reverses the relationship, such as a cause placed as an effect.

Time and order of work

Matching information is the slowest of the three because it asks you to search whole paragraphs. IDP recommends spending no more than 20 minutes on each part of the test and answering every question, since a wrong answer costs nothing. A sensible plan, which is this guide’s advice and not an IELTS rule, is to do the tasks that send you in order through the passage first, and return to matching information once the other questions have shown you where each paragraph’s content sits. The next question you answer is often made easier by what you learned from the last one. The full pacing method is in how to finish IELTS Reading in 60 minutes.

Check your answers

Before you move on, run three quick checks. For matching information, could you underline the exact sentence? For matching features, can you say what the option is said to have done or claimed? For matching sentence endings, does the complete sentence read correctly and say what the passage says? If any of those answers is no, the match is a guess.

Where this fits

All three tasks belong to a family of eleven, laid out in the format and question types overview. For the gist-level matching task, read matching headings tips. The sentence endings task resembles sentence completion, which is covered in completion questions and the word limit. If you find yourself deciding whether a statement agrees with the passage instead of where it appears, you are in True/False/Not Given territory, which has its own method.