True False Not Given type of questions are perhaps the most tricky questions in ILETS reading. Apologize, it’s not ILETS reading but IELTS reading. The wrong spelling of IELTS is intentionally written so that it becomes noticeable and students can avoid making this mistake in writing it incorrectly.

So, we were talking about True False Not Given questions. There are several strategies that must have been told to you during your IELTS training. But today, let us discuss all the don’ts about what we should not do in these True False Not Given questions in IELTS reading in order to solve them correctly.

Not Caring About the Instruction

One of the silly but very common mistakes that students do while solving IELTS reading passage is that they do not care about the instruction in True False Not Given questions. Instead, they mistakenly start writing Yes No Not Given for these questions. Also, sometimes you may see in the instruction that you need to write your answer in the form of code such as T, F, NG but students still start writing True False Not Given or Yes No Not Given etc. Thus, always be careful about these questions to read their instructions mindfully. Because it may so happen that though students understand the question well and know its answer also, but by merely not following the instruction well, they lose their marks.

Ignoring Not Given Option

Another common mistake while doing True False Not Given question is that students ignore Not Given option. With the mindset of marking the questions only as True or False, they do not pay attention to Not Given questions. And for this reason, they mark the False questions also as Not Given. It is thus recommended that you first start checking whether your question is a Not Given question or not. Once you get it right to see that reference of the question is given in the passage, you can then further check whether it is True or False, otherwise mark the question as Not Given.

Ignoring the Controlling Words

There are some controlling words in the question that can completely change the meaning of question. For example, “only”, “never”, “sometimes”, “always”, “ever”, “all”, “some”, “a little”, “more”, “many” etc. are some of the controlling words. One should never ignore such words in the question and should pay more attention. These questions though are mostly False type of questions but can also be Not Given or True. Hence, whenever you are having doubt in the Not Given question, look for these controlling words to understand the statements better and get rid of your confusion between False and Not Given questions.

Spending Too Much Time

A very commonly observed habit among students is to make efforts in trying to solve every question thoroughly and when it comes to a question which is Not Given, they keep on spending so much time to these questions that it ultimately comes out to be not only a wastage of time but also, other questions get affected. Hence, whenever you feel that you are not getting any reference to the question in the passage, just stop looking further for that question and simply mark it as Not Given