Matching Sentence Endings: An Academic-Only Type That Follows the Text

Matching sentence endings appears on the Academic Reading paper and not on General Training, and it is one of only four Reading types where IELTS states that the questions follow the order of the text. That second fact is the one to use: the ending for sentence 3 comes from the passage after the ending for sentence 2, every time.

You are given the first half of a sentence, based on information in the text, and a list of possible endings. You choose the ending that completes it. There are more endings than beginnings, so you will not use all of them. The number of questions is variable and each is worth one mark.

The order rule, and what it is worth

IELTS states that the sentence beginnings are in the same order as the information in the text. Four Reading types carry that guarantee: multiple choice, matching sentence endings, sentence completion and short-answer questions. Most do not.

This turns the task into a walk down the passage rather than a search. Once you have settled sentence 2 in the third paragraph, sentence 3 is somewhere after it and you never need to look back. If your candidate ending for sentence 3 comes from a paragraph before the one where you found sentence 2, one of the two is wrong.

That is not a small thing under time pressure. It is the difference between reading the passage roughly once and reading it once per question.

What IELTS says it tests, and why that is a warning

This type tests your ability to understand the main ideas in the text. Not details. Main ideas.

That matters because the endings look like details. They are short phrases, they contain concrete nouns, and the obvious way to answer is to hunt for one of those nouns in the passage. Doing that lands you on the endings that reuse the passage's words without saying what the passage says.

The right unit of comparison is the whole completed sentence against what the passage claims. An ending that makes a grammatical sentence out of words you recognise is not evidence of anything.

A worked example

Here is a short passage written for this page, with three sentence beginnings and six endings.

The answers are B, C and E, and they come from the passage in that order, which is the order rule doing its work.

Ending D is the sort of thing that is true of many places and is never said here. The passage says iron was the material he had, not that it was cheaper.

Ending F is the trap built out of the first sentence. The passage says the first cast-iron bridge over the gorge, which is not the same claim as the first structure of its kind in the world.

Ending A contradicts the passage outright, which says the bridge was never modified. It is there for anyone who read ending E, saw "never replaced", and stopped reading.

The type it is most often confused with

Multiple choice on both Reading papers can also present the first half of a sentence with four possible endings, so the two look alike on the page. Three things separate them.

Multiple choice gives four endings for that one question. Matching sentence endings gives a single shared list for the whole set, and it is longer than the number of questions.

An ending you use in matching sentence endings is spent, because there are more endings than beginnings and each beginning takes one.

And multiple choice tests detailed understanding of specific points as well as main points, while this type is described only in terms of main ideas.

A method that survives the clock

Read the beginnings first. They are statements about the passage in the order the passage makes them, so together they are close to a summary of what you are about to read, and that is a genuine head start.

Do not read all the endings first. There are more of them than you need, several are built from the passage's vocabulary, and reading them cold plants phrases you will then go looking for.

Work in order, one beginning at a time, moving forward through the passage. When you find the place, read the sentence that owns the claim and then look at the endings, not the other way round.

Check the completed sentence reads as one sentence. Grammar eliminates some endings cheaply, though never trust it to choose between two that both fit.

If you are stuck, move on and come back, because the order rule narrows the gap once the sentences either side are settled. Answer every question before the time goes, since a wrong answer costs nothing beyond the mark you did not earn.

Which paper this is on

Matching sentence endings is listed on the Academic Reading format page and is not among the eight types the General Training page lists. If you are taking General Training you will not meet it, and the closest thing you will meet is multiple choice in its sentence-ending form.

Two other Reading types are Academic only: Yes, No, Not Given, and sentence completion as a type in its own right, which General Training folds into its general completion type.

What a lost mark costs

Each question is one mark out of forty. The published band 7 anchor on Academic Reading is 30 marks, so you can afford ten wrong answers across the whole paper and a single set of these can take a third of that. IELTS Reading raw score to band score works the conversion through, and the Reading band score converter turns a practice raw score into a band.

IELTS Reading question types lists all eleven types and what each one tests.

The task description, the statement that the beginnings follow the order of the text, the skill tested and the absence of this type from the General Training paper come from the IELTS Academic and General Training Reading format pages on ielts.org, last checked in September 2026. The example passage, its sentence beginnings and its endings were written for this page and are not from any test.