Summary, Note, Table and Flow Chart Completion: One Type, Four Shapes

Summary completion is one question type wearing four costumes. A summary, a set of notes, a table and a flow chart are all the same task with the same rules: you complete a gapped version of one part of the passage using words taken from that passage, inside the word limit the instructions give you.

The instructions tell you which costume you are looking at, and IELTS names them exactly: a continuous text is called a summary, several notes are called notes, a table is called a table, and a series of boxes or steps linked by arrows is called a flow chart. On General Training, several sentences are called sentences and belong to this same type rather than to a separate one.

The number of questions is variable and each is worth one mark.

The summary covers part of the passage, not all of it

IELTS says the summary is not normally of the whole text. It will usually be built from one section, and the answers, though they may not come in the passage's order, will usually come from that one part rather than the whole thing.

That is the most useful thing on this page. Before you fill a single gap, work out which part of the passage the summary is retelling. Once you have the right two or three paragraphs, the task collapses from a search of the whole text into a close reading of a small piece of it.

The title of the summary and its first sentence usually tell you where you are. If they do not, the first gap you can confidently fill will.

Two variations, and they want different things from you

In the first variation you select words from the passage to fit the gaps. In the second you choose from a list of words supplied with the question.

The list version looks kinder and traps people in a specific way: the list is longer than the number of gaps, and the spare options are words that appear in the passage doing a different job. Because the words are handed to you, spelling stops being a risk and word class becomes the whole game.

The variation without a list is where the word limit and spelling do their damage, and it is the one the rules below are written for.

The rules that decide most of the marks

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. IELTS states that you lose the mark for writing more than the limit. That is worth reading twice: an answer containing the correct words plus one extra scores nothing, so a gap you have understood can still cost you the mark.

Two smaller rules take the guesswork out of counting. Contracted forms such as "they're" are not tested, so you never have to decide whether one counts as one word or two. And hyphenated words such as "check-in" count as a single word.

Answers must be words taken from the text. You are not being asked to paraphrase, and a synonym that is not in the passage is wrong even when it means exactly the same thing. If the word you want to write is not in the passage, you have the wrong word.

Three ways to lose a mark you had already earned

Spelling is the first. 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. You can copy the word straight off the page here, so this is the cheapest mark on the paper to keep and an expensive one to throw away.

Repeating a word from the question is the second, and it surprises people. If the gapped sentence already contains a word, your answer should not contain it again. IDP gives the example of a question reading "children responded more positively to generous ______", where the answer "giving family members" is marked incorrect because "giving" is what "generous" already said. "Family members" is the answer.

Punctuation is the third, and it mostly bites on numbers. 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. A candidate whose first language uses the opposite convention can lose a mark on an answer they heard or read perfectly.

The answers do not follow the order of the text

For four Reading types, IELTS states that the questions follow the order of the passage. This is not one of them. The format pages say the opposite outright: the answers may not come in the same order as in the text.

So do not fill gap 4 on the assumption that it sits after gap 3. Within the section the summary is drawn from, work by meaning rather than by position, and expect the summary to have reordered things for the sake of reading smoothly.

Sentence completion is the member of this family that does follow the text, which is the practical reason it is worth treating as a separate type even though General Training lists it here.

A worked example

Here is a passage section written for this page, followed by a gapped summary with a two word limit.

The answers are blowing, thin and fire.

Gap 1 is blowing, taken straight from the passage. Note that the summary says "became inexpensive" where the passage says "made it cheap". The summary paraphrases; your answer must not.

Gap 2 is thin. The temptation is to write something that sounds more like a summary, such as "fragile" or "weak", and both would be marked wrong for the same reason: they are not in the passage. If the word you want to write is not on the page in front of you, you have the wrong word or the wrong part of the text.

Gap 3 is fire. The passage says "a fire in 1204", and writing that would be three words, over a two word limit, and worth nothing even though it is more informative. More detail is not a better answer when the limit says otherwise.

What a lost mark costs

Every 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 summary of six gaps 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.

Never leave a gap empty. A wrong answer costs nothing beyond the mark you did not earn, and on a task where the answer is a word already printed in front of you, a considered guess is often right.

This type appears on both papers. Diagram label completion shares its rules and its treatment of order, and sentence completion shares the rules but not the order. IELTS Reading question types lists all eleven and what each one tests.

The four forms of the task, the two variations, the word limit rules, the note that the summary covers part of the text 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 summary were written for this page and are not from any test.