IELTS Reading lists eleven official question types, and most candidates treat them as eleven difficulty settings on the same task. They are not. Each type rewards a different physical behaviour — scanning for a detail, mapping what a paragraph is for, tracking a writer's claims — and practising one does not train the others. Fifty multiple-choice sets train exactly one of the eleven behaviours.
The list is the same for Academic and General Training — ielts.org publishes an identical set of eleven types on both format pages. What differs between the two tests is the texts and the scoring conversion, not the question types.
The failure
The failure this page prevents is undifferentiated practice: doing "Reading practice" as one activity, then discovering on test day that matching headings feels nothing like the sentence completion you rehearsed. The symptom is accuracy that swings wildly between sections for no visible reason — the reason is that only some types match the behaviour you actually practised.
The eleven official types
These are the eleven names exactly as ielts.org lists them. The middle and right columns are our coaching read, not official descriptions — we quote the official wording where it exists.
| Official type | What it asks your eyes to do | Signature trap |
|---|---|---|
| Multiple choice | Anchor on one location in the text, then test every option against that same spot | Options recycle the text's own words with the meaning quietly reversed |
| Identifying information (True/False/Not given) | Compare a statement against information in the text — facts, not opinions | Not given vs False — this type has its own page: see TFNG: the one-line rule |
| Identifying writer's views/claims (Yes/No/Not given) | Track what the writer asserts or believes, not what the text merely reports | Treating a fact the writer quotes from someone else as the writer's own view |
| Matching information | Scan the whole passage for a specific detail that could sit in any paragraph | Assuming the details appear in the same order as the questions |
| Matching headings | Judge each paragraph's overall purpose — why it exists, not what it mentions | Choosing a heading because one sentence in the paragraph matches it |
| Matching features | Link statements to named items — researchers, dates, theories — scattered through the text | A name appears in three paragraphs; only one of them carries the claim you need |
| Matching sentence endings | Hold a sentence stem and test endings for meaning, not just grammar | Several endings fit grammatically; only one is what the text says |
| Sentence completion | Locate the sentence's home in the text and lift the exact words | Changing the word's form so it fits your sentence but no longer matches the text |
| Summary/note/table/flow-chart completion | Follow a paraphrase of one section and map it back to the original wording | The summary's vocabulary deliberately differs from the text's |
| Diagram label completion | Convert a written description into positions on a picture | Spatial language — above, adjacent, feeding into — read too quickly |
| Short-answer questions | Scan for one factual detail and answer in words from the text | The word limit, applied without mercy |
Notice how little the behaviours overlap. Matching headings is a paragraph-level judgement; matching information is a line-level hunt across the whole passage. Doing one of these fast makes you no faster at the other.
On the two Not-given rows, the distinction is official. For True/False/Not given, ielts.org says it tests your ability to "recognise specific information given in the text", and:
"'False' means that the statement contradicts the information in the text. 'Not given' means that the statement neither agrees with nor contradicts the information in the text."
For Yes/No/Not given, the task question becomes "Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer?" and the type tests your ability to "recognise opinions or ideas". Facts versus claims — two different reading behaviours wearing similar clothes.
The word-limit law, and what each question is worth
Several completion and short-answer types carry a word limit, and the official penalty wording is absolute:
"A word limit is given, for example, 'NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER'. You will lose the mark for writing more than the word limit." — ielts.org, Academic Reading format
A correct answer written in too many words is a wrong answer — no partial credit.
The marking is flat: "Each correct answer receives 1 mark." All 40 questions — a one-word gap-fill and a whole-paragraph headings judgement — are worth exactly the same. You have "60 minutes (including transfer time)" for all of them, and ielts.org is explicit that "no extra transfer time is given". So a question type you are slow at is not worth more for being hard — train the behaviour or budget the time.
One sentence, three different questions
Take this invented passage sentence: "Hargreaves' 2019 survey found that fewer than a third of the region's farmers had adopted drip irrigation, a figure she attributes to the upfront cost rather than scepticism about the method."
- Matching features asks you to link "the claim that cost, not doubt, limited uptake" to Hargreaves. Your eyes hunt for the name, then check which claim is genuinely hers.
- Sentence completion — "Fewer than a third of farmers had adopted ______." — asks you to lift drip irrigation exactly. Two words. Writing "the drip irrigation method" loses the mark.
- Yes/No/Not given — "Farmers avoided drip irrigation because they doubted it worked." — asks whether this matches the writer's claim. It contradicts it: she attributes the low uptake to cost "rather than scepticism". The answer is No, and skimming for the word scepticism alone would get it wrong.
Same sentence, three behaviours: hunt a name, lift exact words, test a claim. That is the whole argument of this page in miniature.
What is not officially stated
Honesty about the gaps, because most guides fill them with confident guesswork:
- Order of answers. Prep sites routinely state which types come "in order" in the passage and which do not. The official ielts.org format pages contain no statement about answer order for any type — so we will not assert one either way.
- Per-type frequency. How often each type appears per test is not published officially.
- Spelling in Reading. The official "you will lose marks for incorrect spelling and grammar" quote sits in the Listening section of the format-in-detail page. We found no Reading-specific equivalent, so we will not attribute that sentence to Reading.
- Full official descriptions of every type. Beyond the T/F/NG and Y/N/NG wording quoted above, our per-type behaviour column is coaching, not citation.
What actually costs you
- Training one type and calling it "Reading practice" — the behaviours do not transfer.
- Exceeding the word limit: "You will lose the mark for writing more than the word limit."
- Answering Yes/No/Not given about facts in the text instead of the writer's claims.
- Matching a heading to a detail instead of a paragraph's purpose.
- Spending four minutes on a hard question worth the same 1 mark as an easy one.
Try one
[Try a Reading task →] — one full task, marked, no card required.