Matching Features: When an Option Repeats and When It Is Not Used

Matching features gives you a short list of options, usually people, places, studies or theories taken from the text, and a set of statements to attach to them. Some options are never used and others are used more than once, so counting the options and counting the questions tells you nothing about the answers.

IELTS describes the options as a group of features from the text, and gives the classic shape as matching descriptions of inventions to the people who invented them. The number of questions is variable and each is worth one mark.

The two rules about the option list

Some options will not be used at all, and others may be used more than once. When repeats are allowed, the instructions say so, in the form "You may use any option more than once".

This is the same permission matching information carries and the opposite of matching headings, where no heading may be used twice. So the elimination habit that works on headings actively hurts here. Having assigned option B to question 2 tells you nothing at all about question 3.

Read the instruction line before you start. It is printed when repeats are allowed and absent when they are not, and that one line changes how you should work.

What the type is testing

IELTS names two skills, and they pull in different directions. The first is recognising relationships and connections between facts in the text. The second is recognising opinions and theories.

The second is the harder one, and it is why this type is not simply a scanning exercise. When the options are researchers and the statements are findings, the passage rarely says "Okonkwo found that". It says something closer to "the prevailing view was challenged in 2003, when a survey of coastal sites suggested otherwise", and the name sits two sentences away from the claim.

IELTS is explicit that the working method has two stages: skim and scan to find the information quickly, then read that part more carefully for detail. The finding is fast, the deciding is not.

A worked example

Here is a short passage written for this page, with three statements and four options.

The answers are A, B and B.

Statement 1 is Pryce. The silts are the whole of that argument, and Dalgleish's objection is precisely that they are dated wrong. Note that the passage never says "Pryce's account depends on the silts". You have to see that it does.

Statement 2 is Dalgleish, from the last sentence. The name and the comment are in the same clause, so this is the fast one.

Statement 3 is Dalgleish again, and this is the point of the example. Two questions have the same answer, and if you had crossed B off after question 2 you would now be choosing between A, C and D, all of which are wrong. Option D is a live possibility in some tasks and a trap in others; here it exists only to punish the crossing-off.

Onyeka is never the answer, which is the other half of the rule. An unused option is not a sign that you have missed something.

Where the marks go

Three habits produce most of the lost marks.

Crossing off used options is the first, and the example above shows what it costs.

Matching on the nearest name is the second. In a passage of this shape, every sentence has a name in it, and the name closest to the words you recognised is very often not the one the statement belongs to. The connection is what is being tested, so the answer is the person the claim belongs to, not the person standing nearest the vocabulary.

Reading attribution loosely is the third. "Dalgleish accepted the silts" is not the same as "Dalgleish found the silts", and "Dalgleish has since said that Onyeka's evidence is the strongest objection" is not Dalgleish agreeing with Onyeka. The passage above says outright that she does not.

The format page says nothing about whether the answers follow the order of the text for this type, and it does say so for four others, so treat order as a place to start looking rather than as a rule.

A method that survives the clock

Read the options first, because there are only a handful of them and they are usually names you can then spot in the passage. This is the reverse of the advice for matching headings, and the reason is that these options are labels rather than claims, so they cannot mislead you.

Mark every option where it appears in the passage before you answer anything. You are building an index, and it takes less time than you expect.

Then take each statement, decide what claim it is making, and find which option owns that claim. Where a claim sits between two names, the question is who is asserting it, not who is mentioned.

Answer every question, since a wrong answer costs nothing beyond the mark you did not earn, and with a short option list a guess has real odds.

What a lost mark costs

Each Reading question is one mark out of forty, and the published band 7 anchor is 30 on Academic Reading and 35 on General Training. A set of six matching features questions that costs you three marks has used a third of your Academic margin and more than half your General Training one. IELTS Reading raw score to band score works the conversion through for both papers, and the Reading band score converter turns a practice raw score into a band.

This type appears on both the Academic and General Training papers. IELTS Reading question types lists all eleven and what each one tests.

The task description, the two rules about the option list, the wording of the repeat instruction and the two skills named come from the IELTS Academic and General Training Reading format pages on ielts.org, last checked in September 2026. The example passage, its options and its questions were written for this page and are not from any test.