Or: the IELTS Reading trap that has nothing to do with your vocabulary
Ask a room of C1 students why they lost marks on an IELTS Reading True/False/Not Given section, and most will point to a word they didn’t know. It’s rarely the real cause. This particular question type catches strong readers just as often as weak ones, because the skill it tests isn’t vocabulary at all: it’s a logical distinction English never marks with any special grammar, so it has to be reasoned out fresh, every single time.
The three categories look simple stated plainly. True: the statement matches what the passage says. False: the statement contradicts the passage. Not Given: the passage simply never addresses the claim, in either direction. Students grasp all three in isolation within a minute. The failure happens in application, specifically in telling False and Not Given apart under time pressure.
The test worth teaching explicitly. For any statement that feels like Not Given, ask: could I argue either side of this using only the passage? If the answer is no, because the text is silent on it, that is Not Given, no matter how plausible the claim sounds or how well it matches general knowledge. A statement can be entirely true in the real world and still be Not Given, because Not Given is a question about the text, not about the world.
This is exactly where strong general knowledge becomes a liability rather than an asset. A student who happens to know a lot about the passage’s topic will unconsciously fill in gaps the text left open, and mark something True or False that the passage never actually settled. The weaker general-knowledge student, ironically, sometimes has an easier time here, precisely because they have nothing to fall back on except the words in front of them.
Why this is worth drilling as its own skill. Most exam preparation treats True/False/Not Given as a subset of general reading comprehension, worth a brief explanation before moving on to skimming and scanning technique. It deserves separate, deliberate practice, because the error pattern is consistent and predictable: candidates default to False when they mean Not Given, since ‘the text doesn’t support this’ and ‘the text disagrees with this’ feel like the same kind of wrong until the distinction is drilled specifically.
The failure mode worth knowing about. Once students overcorrect, having been burned by marking something False that was actually Not Given, they start marking almost everything Not Given out of caution. This trades one error pattern for another and is just as costly. The fix is the same in both directions: go back to the exact sentence in the passage that settles the question, and if no such sentence exists, it’s Not Given, confidently rather than nervously.
I’ve put together a free lesson plan on this exact topic, two original short passages, a worked presentation table, controlled and freer practice, an exam-style task, and a full answer key. Download the True, False, or Not Given lesson plan (PDF).