IELTS True False Not Given: how to tell False from Not Given

Most candidates lose the same marks in the same place: they write False where the answer is Not Given. The statement felt wrong, the passage never said it, so False seemed reasonable. That is the most expensive habit in IELTS Reading, and it comes from guessing instead of following a procedure.

This is a guide to that one question type: what each of the three answers actually requires, a decision procedure that removes the guesswork, the traps that turn a Not Given into a False, and how the logic shifts when the question says Yes/No/Not Given. The full set of formats is in the reading question types guide.

What the three answers mean

Each answer has a precise condition, and the exact wording of the rubric matters.

True means the statement agrees with the information in the passage. It does not have to use the same words; a paraphrase that carries the same meaning is still True.

False means the passage contradicts the statement. There has to be a line you can point to that cannot be true alongside it.

Not Given means the passage does not settle the point. The information is absent, incomplete, or too vague to decide.

The three are not symmetrical. True and False both need evidence in the text. Not Given is what you mark when the evidence you need is missing, which is why it feels uncomfortable: you are answering on the basis of something you cannot find.

The decision procedure

Ask three questions in order, on every statement, and the False-versus-Not Given problem mostly dissolves.

First, find the place in the passage. Locate the sentence or two dealing with the same topic. These questions normally follow passage order, so the answer to question 4 sits below the answer to question 3, which bounds where you look. If you genuinely cannot find any related line after a fair search, that is already evidence for Not Given.

Second, ask whether the passage supports the statement. Not "are the words the same" but "does the text back this claim". If it does, mark True, even when the statement is a paraphrase or says less than the passage does. If the passage says the survey covered 1,200 households and the statement says more than a thousand households took part, the passage supports it. That is True.

Third, ask whether the passage contradicts it. This decides False. Does the text explicitly state something that cannot hold at the same time as the statement? If yes, mark False. If the passage is silent on that specific point, or says something related but weaker, mark Not Given.

The trap is jumping from "the passage does not confirm this" straight to False. A missing confirmation is not a contradiction. If the text says a museum opened in 1990 and the statement says 1985, that is False, because the two cannot both hold. If the text says the museum is popular with tourists and the statement says it is the most visited museum in the country, that is Not Given: popular and most visited are different claims, and the text never ranks it.

The traps that manufacture wrong answers

Three patterns account for most of the losses.

Matching words. A statement built from the passage's own vocabulary feels confirmed. Say the text reads "the museum houses works by three local painters" and the statement reads "the museum was founded by three local painters". Every content word matches, and the claim is completely different. Word overlap tells you where to look, never what to answer.

Qualifiers. Words like all, some, most, always, often, may and only decide a sentence's truth by themselves, and direction matters here. A statement weaker than the passage is still True, because the passage supports it. A statement stronger than the passage is the trap: "many researchers argue" is not "all researchers argue", and that swap turns True into False. Underline the qualifier, then check which way the strength runs.

Your own knowledge. You may know the statement is correct in the real world. Irrelevant. The answer lives inside the passage, and outside knowledge is what makes people mark True on a Not Given.

A note on answer distribution: you will often see all three answers in a set, and many teachers advise treating a set with no Not Given as a prompt to recheck. IELTS publishes no rule about this, and sets without all three do occur. Use it to re-examine whether you can point to contradicting words for each False, never to overturn an answer you can evidence.

Yes/No/Not Given is the same logic on a different target

The two types look almost identical and are graded the same way, so the difference is easy to miss.

True/False/Not Given tests facts in the passage. Yes/No/Not Given tests the writer's views or claims, so you are checking what the author thinks rather than what happened. A statement can be factually correct and still get a No, if the writer argues the opposite.

The procedure does not change. Locate, ask whether the text supports it, then ask whether it contradicts it. What changes is the evidence you are hunting for: opinion language, the writer's stance, hedges like "arguably" and "it seems" instead of dates and figures.

What this is worth on your band

Reading has no Band Descriptors. It is 40 questions converted to a band by a table, so progress here is countable in a way Writing never is (Reading band score).

That makes this question type unusually worth drilling. Say a practice test puts you at 27 correct, and three of the marks you dropped were True/False/Not Given. You are applying one decision rule wrongly, three times. On the widely used Academic conversion, which is approximate to about a mark either way, 27 is a 6.5 and 30 is a 7.0. Your next half band is three questions of one type, not a general instruction to read more.

Drill it in five minutes

• The contradiction drill. Take ten statements you got wrong and, for each, write out the exact words from the passage that contradict it. If you cannot find any, the answer was Not Given, and you have proved it to yourself rather than being told.
• The qualifier drill. Underline every qualifier in ten statements, then check which way the strength runs against the passage. Thirty seconds each, and the "many becomes all" trap stops working on you.
• The target drill. Take a mixed set of ten and label each question fact or opinion before you answer, ten seconds each. That label is what decides True/False/Not Given versus Yes/No/Not Given.

That is the loop IELTS Drills is built around. Instead of another full timed paper that re-confirms the same 27, you run short reps on the exact question type leaking marks, five minutes a day, until the decision comes automatically.

Frequently asked questions

What is the difference between False and Not Given? False means the passage contradicts the statement. A quick test: can both sentences be true at the same time? If they cannot, it is False. If they can, or the passage simply never addresses it, it is Not Given.

If I cannot find the information, is it Not Given? Usually yes, provided you searched the right part of the passage. These questions normally run in passage order, so use the answers on either side to narrow the search before deciding.

Do matching words mean the answer is True? No. Not Given statements are frequently assembled from the passage's own vocabulary. A statement can share every content word with a sentence and still make a claim the text never made.

What is the difference from Yes/No/Not Given? The logic is identical, but True/False/Not Given tests facts stated in the passage while Yes/No/Not Given tests the writer's views or claims.

Can I use my own knowledge? No. Answer only from the passage. A statement that is true in the real world is still Not Given if the text does not support it.

Should I write T, F, NG or the full words? The instructions tell you to write TRUE, FALSE or NOT GIVEN, so write the full words. Abbreviations are often said to be accepted when clearly written, but IELTS does not publish that, and two mistakes cost real marks anyway: writing T or F on a Yes/No/Not Given set, and shortening NOT GIVEN to a single "N", which reads as No.

The bottom line

True/False/Not Given is a rule, not a hunch. Locate the relevant lines, ask whether the passage supports the statement, and mark False only when the text explicitly contradicts it. Anything the passage never settles is Not Given, however wrong the statement feels. Watch which way the qualifiers run. Then check whether the question is asking about facts or the writer's views, because that decides which of the two formats you are in. The other Reading formats and how each changes your approach are in the reading question types guide. With IELTS Drills, the feedback tells you which question type is still costing you the 0.5, five minutes a day.