Every hard True/False/Not Given item comes down to one distinction, and ielts.org states it in two sentences:
"'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."
FALSE means the text actively contradicts the statement. NOT GIVEN means the text is silent. That is the whole rule. The question, as ielts.org phrases it, is "Do the following statements agree with the information in the text?" — and the skill being tested is your ability to "recognise specific information given in the text." Not information you can infer. Not information that is probably true in the real world. Information given.
Test writers know that most candidates blur FALSE and NOT GIVEN into one vague category called "wrong". So they build statements that sit exactly on the line between them — statements that feel false but are merely absent, and statements that feel true but were never actually said.
The failure
There are two, and the first one happens before you read a single statement.
Failure one: answering in the wrong mode. IELTS Reading has two separate question types that look almost identical. Ielts.org lists them as "Identifying information (True/False/Not given)" and "Identifying writer's views/claims (Yes/No/Not given)". They are not the same task. For True/False/Not Given, the instruction asks whether statements "agree with the information in the text", and it tests whether you can "recognise specific information given in the text". For Yes/No/Not Given, the instruction asks "Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer?" or "the claims of the writer", and it tests whether you can "recognise opinions or ideas". The official definitions differ in the same way:
"'No' means that the statement contradicts the writer's view or claim. 'Not given' means that the statement neither agrees with nor contradicts the writer's view or claim."
One type is about facts in the text — the other is about what the writer believes or claims. If you hunt for facts on a Yes/No/Not Given set, or judge a factual statement by the writer's apparent attitude on a True/False/Not Given set, you can lose marks while understanding every word of the passage. Read the instruction line before the statements — it tells you which game you are playing.
Failure two: marking FALSE when the text is silent. A statement mentions something the passage never discusses, but it clashes with the passage's general drift — so it feels wrong, and you write FALSE. By the official definition, FALSE requires a contradiction you can point to. No sentence contradicts it, no mark.
A worked example — four statements on the line
Here is a short passage, written by AlmiPrep as an original practice text — it is not from a real test. Read it once, then judge the four statements.
Urban beekeeping has grown steadily in many European cities over the past two decades. In London, the number of registered hives more than doubled between 2008 and 2013, and rooftop hives now sit on hotels, banks and museums. Some researchers have warned that the city may hold more bees than its parks and gardens can feed, since a single hive can require the nectar of roughly a hectare of flowering plants. Newcomers are often surprised by the cost of the pastime — a basic hive, protective clothing and a colony of bees together typically come to several hundred pounds. City councils in Britain do not license beekeepers, although voluntary registers exist.
- The number of registered hives in London more than doubled over a five-year period.
- Beekeepers in British cities must obtain a licence from their council.
- Urban beekeeping has grown because people want to help declining bee populations.
- The cost of starting beekeeping has fallen in recent years.
Statement 1 — TRUE. The text says the hives "more than doubled between 2008 and 2013". The statement never mentions those years — it says "a five-year period", and 2008 to 2013 is five years. That is the standard TRUE mechanic: the statement agrees with a line in the text, but paraphrased, so you cannot confirm it by word-matching. You have to do the small arithmetic.
Statement 2 — FALSE. The text says councils "do not license beekeepers". The statement says a licence is required. One line in the passage directly contradicts the statement — that, and only that, is what FALSE means. Note that "voluntary registers exist" is placed right beside it to muddy the water: a voluntary register is not a licence.
Statement 3 — NOT GIVEN, and this is the one that costs people marks. It feels true. The passage says beekeeping has grown, and everything you know about the world says people keep bees to help bees. But find the sentence that gives the reason for the growth. There isn't one. The text reports that growth happened — it never says a word about why. A plausible motive you supplied from outside the passage is not "specific information given in the text". The moment you catch yourself thinking "well, it must be because..." you have left the text — and the answer to anything you inferred rather than read is NOT GIVEN.
Statement 4 — NOT GIVEN, the mirror trap. It feels false. The passage stresses that newcomers are "surprised by the cost" and quotes several hundred pounds — surely that contradicts "the cost has fallen"? It doesn't. Something can be expensive today and still cheaper than it used to be. The statement is about a trend over time — the text gives one snapshot of the price and says nothing about its direction. No contradiction, no FALSE. Silence, so NOT GIVEN.
Qualifiers: where contradiction hides
The official definitions make FALSE hinge on contradiction — and the easiest place to build or hide a contradiction is a qualifier: some, all, most, only, always, never, must, may. In the passage above, "some researchers have warned that the city may hold more bees than its parks can feed" is doubly hedged. A statement reading "Scientists agree that London has too many bees" would fail on both hedges — "some researchers" does not confirm agreement, and a warning about what "may" be true does not confirm that it is. Check every qualifier in the statement against the qualifier in the text — a mismatch there is usually the whole question.
To be clear about what is official here: the FALSE and NOT GIVEN definitions quoted above are ielts.org's own wording. The trap patterns — qualifiers, inferred motives, snapshot-versus-trend — are our reading of how statements get built around those definitions, not official categories, and IELTS publishes no statistics about how often any of them appear.
What actually costs you
- Judging statements against the world instead of the text. Real-world plausibility is exactly what the "feels true" NOT GIVEN trap is made of.
- Writing FALSE with no contradicting line to point to. If you cannot quote the sentence that contradicts the statement, your answer is NOT GIVEN.
- Ignoring the instruction line and playing True/False/Not Given rules on a Yes/No/Not Given set — facts and the writer's claims are officially different tasks.
- Word-matching. TRUE statements are paraphrased on purpose — shared vocabulary between statement and text proves nothing either way.
- Skipping qualifiers. "Some" in the text and "all" in the statement is a contradiction — that single word is the question.
Each Reading question is worth the same: ielts.org states that "Each correct answer receives 1 mark" — a rescued Not Given counts exactly as much as any other answer on the paper.
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