Sentence Completion: Words From the Text, Inside the Word Limit

Sentence completion gives you gapped sentences to fill with words taken from the passage, and it is one of only four Reading types where IELTS states that the questions follow the order of the text. That makes it the fastest question type on the paper to work through, because you never have to search backwards.

You fill a gap in each sentence by choosing words from the passage. A word limit is printed in the instructions, in the form NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER, and it changes from task to task. The number of questions is variable and each is worth one mark.

The order rule is the whole method

IELTS states it for four Reading types: multiple choice, matching sentence endings, sentence completion and short-answer questions. The answer to question 3 sits after the answer to question 2 in the passage, every time.

So work down the questions and down the passage together. Read question 1, find its place, answer it, and start reading for question 2 from where you stopped. You will read the relevant part of the passage roughly once.

The rule also catches errors for free. If your answer to question 5 came from a paragraph above your answer to question 4, one of the two is wrong, and you know that without checking either against the passage.

This is the sharpest difference between this type and summary completion, which shares every other rule with it. There, the format pages say the answers may not come in the passage's order. Here, they say they do.

Which paper lists it, and why the difference is only on paper

The Academic Reading format page lists sentence completion as a question type of its own. The General Training page does not list it separately. It appears there as one form of the completion type, whose shapes explicitly include several sentences, called sentences in the instructions.

A General Training candidate therefore meets this exact task under a different heading. Nothing about how it works changes, which is why this page covers both papers. If you are taking General Training, look for sentence completion inside the completion type rather than as its own entry on the format page.

The rules on what you may write

Answers must be words from the passage. This type is not asking you to summarise or reword anything; it is asking you to find the words that already say it. A synonym that is not in the text is wrong even when it means the same thing.

Going over the word limit loses the mark, and IELTS says so directly. An answer that contains the right words plus an extra article or adjective earns nothing, so a gap you have understood perfectly can still cost you a mark.

Two rules remove the counting arguments. Contracted forms such as "they're" are not tested, so you will never have to decide whether one is one word or two. 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. On this type the word is printed in front of you, so a spelling error is a mark you found and then gave back.

Grammar is the check that costs nothing

The completed sentence has to work as a sentence. That is not a rule IELTS publishes, it is simply what the task is, and it is the cheapest way to catch a wrong answer.

Before you commit to a gap, work out what kind of word it needs. A gap after "a" or "the" wants a noun. A gap after "to" usually wants a verb. A gap between a number and a noun wants neither. If the words you have chosen do not fit that slot, you have found the right part of the passage and lifted the wrong piece of it, which is a much easier error to fix than a wrong search.

Watch singular and plural, since the passage often gives a plural where the gapped sentence needs one item, and the sentence will tell you which.

A worked example

Here is a passage section written for this page, with three sentences to complete under a two word limit.

The answers are spring, lift and new roof, and they appear in the passage in that order, which is the order rule doing its work.

Question 1 is spring. The passage says the keeper left "the following spring" after 1978, which is 1979, so the sentence is asking you to read a date the passage gives indirectly. The answer is still one word lifted from the page.

Question 2 is lift. Note that "the cost of a lift" in the passage becomes "the price of a" in the question, so the paraphrase is on the question's side and your answer stays in the passage's words.

Question 3 is new roof, two words, at the limit. Writing "a new roof" would be three and would score nothing. Writing "roof" alone is a judgement call, and "new roof" is the safer answer because it is what the passage says the money bought.

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 set of six of these costing 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, and the Reading band score converter turns a practice raw score into a band.

Fill every gap. A wrong answer costs nothing beyond the mark you did not earn, and on a type where the answer is a word already in front of you, a guess from the right paragraph is often right.

This task appears on both papers, under its own heading on Academic and inside the completion type on General Training. Summary completion carries the same rules in full, and diagram label completion is the third member of the family. IELTS Reading question types lists all eleven and what each one tests.

The task description, the statement that the questions follow the order of the text, the word limit rules and the difference in how the two papers list the type come from the IELTS Academic and General Training Reading 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 sentences were written for this page and are not from any test.