True, False, Not Given: How to Tell False From Not Given

False means the text says the opposite of the statement. Not Given means the text does not say either way. That is the whole official definition, and nearly every lost mark on this question type comes from blurring the second half of it: a statement that feels wrong, or that you happen to know is wrong, gets marked False when the passage never addressed it.

IELTS calls the type "Identifying information". You are given a list of statements and asked one question: do the following statements agree with the information in the text? The answer for each is True, False or Not Given, and the format page adds one warning that is worth reading as an instruction. You must not use any information you already know about the topic when choosing your answer. The test is whether the passage says it, never whether it is so.

The three answers, defined

True means the statement agrees with the information in the text. The wording will almost never match: the statement paraphrases, and your job is to decide whether the paraphrase says the same thing.

False means the statement contradicts the information in the text. The passage has to say something that cannot be true at the same time as the statement. If the statement says the bridge opened in 1932 and the passage says 1935, that is False. If the statement says the bridge was the longest in Europe and the passage says it was the longest in Britain, that is also False, because the passage's claim rules out the statement's.

Not Given means the statement neither agrees with nor contradicts the text. The passage may talk about the same topic, use the same words and sit in exactly the place you expected to find the answer, and still say nothing about whether the statement holds.

A worked example

Here is a short passage written for this page, followed by three statements.

Statement 1 is False. The passage says the library moved in 1950, which rules out its having stayed on one site since 1904.

Statement 2 is False. The passage says he refused to have his name on it, which is the opposite of the statement.

Statement 3 is Not Given. The passage says the riverside site was purpose built. It says nothing about who designed it. "Local" appears in the passage, attached to the brewer, and that is the sort of shared word that pulls a reader toward False or True. The passage does not mention an architect at all, so it cannot agree or disagree.

Why Not Given is the one that costs marks

A False answer needs evidence. You should be able to point to the sentence in the passage that the statement contradicts. A Not Given answer is the absence of evidence, which is harder to be sure of, and the pull is always toward one of the other two: the topic is there, the words are there, so the answer must be there.

Two habits produce most wrong answers. The first is knowledge. If you know the statement is untrue in the real world, it is tempting to mark it False, and the official warning exists because that instinct is common. The passage is the only source. The second is overreading. A statement that adds a detail, a reason or a comparison the passage never made is Not Given even when everything else in it matches. "The library moved because the chapel was damp" is Not Given if the passage only says the collection outgrew it.

The test for False is strict: the passage must say something incompatible with the statement. If you cannot name what the passage says that makes the statement impossible, you have not found a False. You have found a Not Given, or a True you have misread.

Where the statements are in the text

IELTS says that for four question types the answers follow the order of the passage: multiple choice, matching sentence endings, sentence completion and short-answer questions. The format page does not say this about True/False/Not Given. The statements often track the passage anyway, so use that: once you have found statement 3, look for statement 4 further on.

Do not use it the other way round. A statement whose evidence is not where you expected is not thereby Not Given. It may sit a paragraph later, or be split across two sentences. The order is a search aid. The absence of evidence is only established by reading the relevant part of the passage and finding that it does not settle the point.

A method that holds up under time pressure

Underline what the statement actually claims. Most statements have one testable part: a date, a quantity, a cause, a comparison, a person's attitude. Find the passage sentence that is about the same thing, usually by scanning for a name, a number or a word that is hard to paraphrase. Then compare the claim, not the topic. Ask whether the passage says the same thing, the opposite thing, or nothing about that particular point.

Watch for qualifiers, because they are where True and False are decided. "Some", "all", "only", "the first", "mainly" and "always" each change what a statement claims. A passage that says most residents supported the plan does not agree with a statement that all of them did, and it does not contradict it either.

Answer every statement. A wrong answer costs nothing beyond the mark you did not earn, so a guess is always better than a blank, and if you are stuck between False and Not Given, the question to ask is whether you can point to the contradicting sentence.

How much this type is worth

IELTS gives the number of questions for every type as "variable", so a paper may have four of these or a dozen. Each is one mark, and on Academic Reading the band 7 anchor is 30 out of 40, so a set of six True/False/Not Given questions that costs you three marks has used a third of your margin. IELTS Reading raw score to band score works through the conversion for both papers, and the Reading band score converter turns a practice score into a band.

This type appears on both the Academic and General Training papers. Its Academic-only sibling, Yes, No, Not Given, asks the same question about the writer's views rather than the facts, and the two are marked differently enough to be worth reading side by side. IELTS Reading question types lists all eleven types and what each one tests. There is a short definition in the glossary.

The definitions of the three answers, the question wording and the warning about prior knowledge come from the IELTS Academic and General Training Reading format pages on ielts.org, last checked in September 2026. The example passage was written for this page and is not from any test.