Short Answer Questions: Where Spelling Costs the Mark

Short answer questions ask about factual details, and the answer is always words taken from the passage, inside the word limit the instructions give you. There is no option list, so you write the answer yourself, and that makes this the Reading type where spelling costs the most marks.

The questions follow the order of the passage, which puts this among the four Reading types with that guarantee. The number of questions is variable and each is worth one mark.

What you are allowed to write

Answers must be taken from words in the text. IELTS states it plainly for this type, and it removes a whole category of thinking: you are not being asked to answer the question in your own words, only to find the words that already answer it.

The 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. Going over it loses the mark, so an answer that is right plus one extra word scores nothing.

Numbers may be written either as figures or as words. Both 2 and two are accepted, which is one of the few places on the paper where IELTS tells you a choice does not matter.

Contracted forms such as "they're" are not tested, so you will never have to decide whether one counts as one word or two. Hyphenated words such as "check-in" count as a single word.

Spelling is where this type takes its marks back

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 a type with no list to choose from, that lands harder than anywhere else on the paper.

It is also the most avoidable loss on the paper, because the word is printed in front of you. The habit worth building is copying rather than remembering: find the word, then look at it while you write it, rather than reading it, looking away, and reconstructing it.

Two further rules from the same source are worth knowing here. An answer that repeats a word already used in the question is marked incorrect, so if the question asks what kind of engine a vehicle used, the word "engine" does not belong in your answer. And number punctuation is marked: in English a comma separates thousands and a full stop marks a decimal, so three thousand is 3,000 and six and a half is 6.5.

The question word tells you the shape of the answer

This is method rather than a published rule, and it is the fastest check available on this type.

A question beginning "who" wants a person or an organisation. "When" wants a time or a date. "How many" or "how much" wants a number, which is the one case where the AND/OR A NUMBER half of the limit usually matters. "Where" wants a place. "What" is the loose one and needs the rest of the sentence to pin it down.

If what you have written does not match the shape the question asked for, you have found the right area of the passage and taken the wrong words out of it. That is a quick fix. A wrong search is not.

The order rule

IELTS states that the answers come in the same order as the information in the text. Four Reading types carry that guarantee: multiple choice, matching sentence endings, sentence completion and this one.

So work forward. Answer question 1, then start reading for question 2 from where you stopped. If your answer to question 4 came from before your answer to question 3, one of them is wrong.

The two types that share this one's rules about what you may write do not share this. Summary completion and diagram label completion both carry the opposite statement, that answers may not come in the passage's order.

A worked example

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

The answers are 3,500, county council and transport plan.

Question 1 is 3,500. Note the comma. Writing 3.500 would be three and a half in English and would be marked wrong, which is exactly the punctuation trap.

Question 2 is county council. Two words, at the limit. Writing "the county council" would be three and would score nothing, and this is the most common way a correct answer gets thrown away on this type.

Question 3 is transport plan. The passage says "the county's transport plan", and copying that whole phrase is four words. Trimming to the two that answer the question is the skill the limit is testing. Note also what you must not do: "council transport document" describes it accurately, and every word of it that is not in the passage makes it wrong.

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 five of these costing 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.

Write something for every question. A wrong answer costs nothing beyond the mark you did not earn, and on a type where the answer is a word on the page in front of you, a guess from the right paragraph is often the right words.

This type appears on both papers. IELTS Reading question types lists all eleven types and what each one tests, and completes the set alongside this page.

The task description, the requirement that answers come from words in the text, the word limit rules, the note that numbers may be figures or words and the statement about order come from the IELTS Academic and General Training Reading format pages on ielts.org, last checked in September 2026. The statements about spelling, repeated words and number punctuation come from IDP, one of the three organisations that own IELTS, also last checked in September 2026. The example passage and its questions were written for this page and are not from any test.