How do I tackle True False Not Given in IELTS Reading?

This is one of the areas where people find it challenging to score perfectly. 

These reading task questions always occur in a sequence, so the most important tip here is to read the questions following the preliminary questions. For example, if you are looking for the answer to question 1, read and understand the 2nd question.

The most common problem is between ‘False’ and ‘Not Given’. There’s a difference between FALSE and NOT GIVEN, which most students find challenging to identify. The solution probably is guessing the correct opposite of a given question statement. 

For example, the question says: “Jatin lives in the north of Faridabad,” the opposite of this statement could be either “Jatin works in the north of Faridabad” or “Jatin lives in the south of Faridabad” or the name of the city is changed. So, if we find the exact opposite, we are going to mark it FALSE. If there’s no information about where Jatin lives or either he lives in the north or west isn’t specified, the answer goes with NOT GIVEN. So, in case we find the location, we find something opposite of the question statement. The answer is going to be FALSE. If we do not see or half of the information is provided, the solution stays NOT GIVEN.

Most importantly- Just because an answer is NOT GIVEN does not mean there are no words in the statements that match terms in the text. This confuses people, and if words match, then it must be TRUE or FALSE, right? Not really. 

This is not a good way to think about these questions because there probably will be matching words for NOT GIVEN answers. They simply don’t have enough information to answer the question as a whole.

Another common mistake is identifying keywords in the statements and then finding words that exactly match them in the text. The tricky part here is that the terms will often be synonyms.

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