Matching Headings: Finding the Main Idea, Not a Supporting One

A heading has to match what a paragraph is mainly about, not something the paragraph happens to mention. IELTS is direct about it: this type tests your ability to recognise the difference between the main idea and a supporting idea. Nearly every wrong answer is a heading that is true of one sentence in the paragraph and wrong about the paragraph as a whole.

IELTS gives you a list of headings and a text divided into paragraphs or sections. A heading summarises the main idea of a paragraph, and your job is to match each heading to the paragraph it belongs to. The number of questions is variable, and each one is worth a mark.

Three published facts about the list of headings

There will always be more headings than paragraphs or sections, so some headings will not be used at all. No heading may be used more than once. And some paragraphs may not be included in the task, while one or more may already be matched with a heading as an example.

Take those together and elimination is worth something here that it is not worth elsewhere. Once you are certain a heading belongs to paragraph C, it is gone from the list for every other paragraph. Work from the paragraphs you are most sure about and the list shrinks under you.

The worked example, when the task gives you one, is not decoration either. It shows you the level of generality the heading writer is working at, which is the single hardest thing to judge from the headings alone.

Main idea against supporting idea

The main idea of a paragraph is the point the paragraph exists to make. A supporting idea is evidence, an example, a cause, a contrast or a qualification that the paragraph uses to make that point. Both are in the paragraph. Only one of them is what the paragraph is about.

Most distractor headings are built from supporting ideas. They are accurate. They name something the paragraph really does say. They are still wrong, because a heading that covers one sentence out of six is not a summary of the paragraph.

The reverse mistake is rarer but costs the same. A heading can be too broad, describing the whole passage rather than this paragraph, and it will feel safe because nothing in it is false.

A worked example

Here is a short paragraph written for this page, with four candidate headings.

The answer is ii.

Heading i is true. The railway does arrive, and it is the event the paragraph turns on. But the paragraph is not about the railway. It is about what the railway did to the mills, and a heading that stops at the arrival leaves out everything the paragraph spends its words on.

Heading iii is a supporting idea, and a small one. Animal feed appears in the last sentence as the reason one mill survived. It is the most tempting kind of wrong answer, because you can point at the exact words.

Heading iv is too broad. Steam power is in the paragraph, but the paragraph is about three mills in one town, not about an industrial era.

Why the wrong heading is usually true

This is the habit to break. On True, False, Not Given you are asking whether a statement is supported by the text, so "is this true?" is the right question. Here it is the wrong question, and asking it will lead you to a distractor almost every time, because the distractors are true.

The question that works is narrower. Does this heading cover the whole paragraph, or only part of it? A heading you can defend by quoting one sentence is usually the trap. A heading you can defend only by pointing at the paragraph's shape, first this, then that, therefore this, is usually the answer.

A method that survives the clock

Read the paragraph first, then look at the headings. Reading the list first plants the distractors in your head and you will start hunting for the words in them.

After each paragraph, say the point in your own words in about six words before you look at the list. If you cannot, read the first and last sentences again, since that is where a paragraph most often states what it is doing.

Then match your six words to a heading rather than matching the paragraph to a heading. It is a smaller comparison and the supporting ideas drop out of it.

Leave the paragraphs you cannot settle and come back once the list is shorter. Since no heading is used twice, every confident answer makes the rest easier, and there is no reason to spend your best minutes on your worst paragraph.

Answer every question. A wrong answer costs nothing beyond the mark you did not get, so a blank is strictly worse than a guess.

The one that looks like this but is not

Matching information uses the same word and works the other way round. It asks you to find a specific detail in a paragraph rather than the paragraph's main idea, and IELTS defines it partly by that contrast. The two also handle repeats in opposite directions: no heading may be used twice, while a paragraph may be the answer to more than one matching information question.

If you mark them with the same instinct, you will lose marks on both.

What a lost mark costs

Each question in Reading is worth one mark out of forty, whichever type it is. The published band 7 anchor is 30 marks on Academic Reading and 35 on General Training, so a heading set that costs you three marks has taken a third of your Academic margin and well over 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 description of the task, the three rules about the heading list and the statement that it tests main idea against supporting idea come from the IELTS Academic and General Training Reading format pages on ielts.org, last checked in September 2026. The example paragraph and its headings were written for this page and are not from any test.