Diagram Label Completion: Turning a Description Into a Picture

Diagram label completion asks you to label a picture using words from the passage, and the picture is always built from a description the passage already gives in prose. The passage never mentions the diagram, so your first job is to work out which paragraphs the drawing came from and read them as instructions rather than as text.

The diagram may be a machine, part of a building, or anything else in the passage that can be shown in a picture. You fill the labels with words taken from the passage, inside the word limit the instructions give you. The number of questions is variable and each is worth one mark.

The diagram is a translation, and you are checking it

IELTS names the skill precisely: understanding a detailed description in the text, then relating that description to information given in a diagram. Two steps, and candidates mostly lose marks on the second.

The passage will describe something in the order a writer finds natural, which is rarely the order an eye moves across a drawing. A description might work outwards from a central chamber while the diagram is labelled left to right. Neither is wrong. They are two arrangements of the same object, and the work is holding both at once.

That is why the answers may not come in the same order as in the passage. IELTS states it for this type and for summary completion, and states the opposite for four other types. Do not assume label 2 sits after label 1 in the text.

What the format pages do promise is that the answers will usually come from one part of the passage rather than the whole of it. Find that part first and the task gets much smaller.

Read the diagram before you read the passage

The drawing tells you things the passage cannot. It shows you how many parts there are, which parts are already named, where your gaps sit in relation to those names, and often what kind of thing is missing.

A gap sitting on a line pointing at a container wants the name of a container. A gap directly under a labelled pipe, in a row of similar labels, probably wants a word of the same kind as its neighbours. The labels you are given are the strongest clue to the labels you are not.

Use the named parts as anchors. Find one of them in the passage and you have found the paragraph, and from there the gaps around it are close by in the prose even if they are not in order.

The rules on what you may write

The word limit is printed in the instructions, in the form NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER, and it changes between tasks. Going over it loses the mark, which IELTS states directly. On a diagram this matters more than it looks, because the natural way to label a part is with a phrase and the natural phrase is often three words long.

Answers are words taken from the passage. A label that describes the part correctly in your own words is wrong. Contracted forms such as "they're" are not tested, and hyphenated words such as "check-in" count as one word.

Spelling is marked. IDP, one of the three organisations that own IELTS, states that words with spelling errors in the Reading and Listening tests are marked as incorrect, so a technical term you have found and then mistyped scores nothing.

A worked example

Here is a passage section written for this page, with a diagram described in words, since the real thing is a drawing.

The answers are settling tank, reed bed, holding pond and bypass channel.

Every one of them is two words, which is a common shape in this task and a good reason to check the limit before you start rather than after.

The curved arrow is the label most people lose. It is the only element on the diagram that is not a stage, and its answer sits in the passage's last sentence, well after the stages it connects. Someone working on the assumption that the labels follow the text would look for it between the settling tank and the holding pond and find nothing.

Note also that "reed bed" and "gravel channel" both describe stage 3, and both appear in the passage. "Reed bed" is the name of the stage; "a shallow gravel channel" is the description that follows it. When two candidate answers both fit, take the one the passage is using as a name.

Where this differs from the Listening version

The Listening paper has a type called plan, map or diagram labelling, and it is not the same task. There you select your answers from a list supplied with the question. Here you take the words from the passage yourself, with a word limit and with spelling marked.

So practice on Listening diagram questions does not prepare you for the writing half of this one, which is where its marks are lost.

What a lost mark costs

Each Reading question is one mark out of forty. The published band 7 anchor is 30 marks on Academic Reading and 35 on General Training, so a diagram of five labels that costs you three marks has taken 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, and the Reading band score converter turns a practice raw score into a band.

Label every gap. A wrong answer costs nothing beyond the mark you did not earn.

This type appears on both papers. Summary completion carries the family's rules in full and shares this type's treatment of order, while sentence completion shares the rules but follows the text. IELTS Reading question types lists all eleven and what each one tests.

The task description, the statement that the diagram is based on a description in the text, the note about order, the word limit rules and the description of the Listening labelling type come from the IELTS Academic and General Training Reading and Listening format pages on ielts.org, last checked in September 2026. The statement that a misspelled answer is marked incorrect comes from IDP, one of the three organisations that own IELTS, also last checked in September 2026. The example passage and its diagram were written for this page and are not from any test.