Completion questions — sentence, summary, note and table — hand you half the answer before you read a single line of the passage: the grammar of the gap tells you what kind of word must fill it. This lesson installs the predict-then-locate routine, the word-limit discipline, and the exact-word rule that decides these marks.
The gap speaks first
Read the gapped sentence on its own and it constrains the answer hard:
The device measures changes in ________ throughout the night.
Whatever fills that gap is a noun (after in), probably an uncountable or plural one (no article), and semantically something measurable — temperature, pressure, movement. You know all this before touching the passage. That prediction transforms your search: you are no longer looking for "the answer", you are looking for a measurable noun near the words device and night.
The rule: before locating, extract three things from every gap — word class, number/form, and meaning category. Prediction first, passage second.
The quick grammar reads:
| Gap environment | Predict |
|---|---|
| a / an / the ________ | singular noun (or adjective + noun) |
| ________ are / were | plural noun |
| to ________ the process | base-form verb |
| by ________ the samples | -ing verb |
| more ________ than | adjective or noun |
| in ________, / During ________ | date, period, place, or event noun |
If your final answer breaks the prediction — a verb in a noun slot, a singular after these — the answer is wrong, no matter how right it feels. The completed sentence must be grammatical. This check catches errors in ten seconds that re-reading the passage would never catch.
Locate, then copy — the exact-word rule
With a prediction in hand, run the standard location routine: pick keywords from the words around the gap (they are paraphrases of the passage sentence), scan, confirm by meaning. Completion questions almost always follow passage order, so each answer lives below the previous one.
Then the step with the sharpest rule in all of IELTS Reading:
The answer is copied from the passage exactly as it is spelled there. You may not change its form, fix its number, or substitute a synonym. Ever.
If the passage says migration and you write migrations, the mark is gone. If the passage says rapid growth and you write fast growth, the mark is gone — even though your version means the same and even fits the sentence. The frame around the gap is paraphrased; the answer itself is verbatim. This is the inverse of every other question type, where word-matching is the trap: here, on the answer word itself, word-matching is the law.
One consequence worth stating: spelling is transcription, not memory. Copy letter by letter from the passage. A correctly located, correctly chosen, misspelled answer scores zero.
Word-limit discipline
Every completion set states a limit: ONE WORD ONLY, NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS, NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER. Treat it as a hard constraint with three operating rules:
- Read the limit before question 1, and rewrite it at the top of the set — candidates lose runs of marks by carrying the previous set's limit forward.
- Hyphenated words count as one word; a number written in digits counts as a number. Well-being fits a one-word limit; 45 fits and/or a number.
- When the passage phrase is longer than the limit, the limit is the editor. Passage: the sudden collapse of the northern colonies. Gap: the ________ of the northern colonies with a two-word limit → sudden collapse. Strip articles and trailing prepositions first; keep the content words the gap's grammar demands.
Summary completion: two variants, two games
From the passage (write words): identical to sentence completion, with one difference — the summary usually covers one section of the passage, not all of it. Locate the section first (the summary's opening phrase tells you where it starts), then work gap by gap inside it. Gaps run in passage order within the section.
From a box (choose words A–L): now the words are given and the game is pure meaning. The box always contains same-word-class clusters — four nouns that could all plausibly fit a noun gap — so grammar eliminates less and paraphrase decides more. Predict the meaning category for each gap, shortlist 2–3 box words, and let the located passage sentence pick the winner. Cross out used options unless told otherwise. This variant is paraphrase recognition in its purest form; the drill there feeds this type directly.
The distractor seeded next door
The passage sentence around your answer often contains a second, grammatically plausible noun — placed there for you. In "the survey recorded participants' diet, though its main focus was sleep quality", a gap asking what the survey mainly examined wants sleep quality; diet sits one clause away wearing the right word class. The defence is the same confirm-by-meaning discipline as always: the gap's sentence is a paraphrase of the passage sentence — match the whole meaning, not the nearest noun.
Your drill
Fifteen minutes.
- Open Reading 2026-04 Test 4 and find a completion set. Before locating anything, write your three-part prediction (class / form / category) next to every gap. Thirty seconds per gap, no peeking at the passage.
- Answer the set. For every answer, do the two mechanical checks aloud: does the completed sentence read grammatically? and is this the passage's exact spelling within the word limit?
- Check. Classify each miss: prediction wrong, location wrong, next-door distractor, form changed, or limit broken. The last two are free marks — they should hit zero immediately.
- Repeat with Reading 2026-01 Test 2, timed at 60 seconds per gap.
Completion types are the most mechanical marks in the reading test. Prediction, location, verbatim copy, two checks — a closed loop with no judgement calls, which is exactly why a disciplined candidate rarely drops them.