IELTS Reading: Yes/No/Not Given Is Not True/False/Not Given

Two tasks that look identical and are not

Open a Reading paper and you may meet either of these instruction lines:

Do the following statements agree with the information given in the passage? Write TRUE, FALSE or NOT GIVEN.

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in the passage? Write YES, NO or NOT GIVEN.

Most candidates read three options, recognise the shape, and apply the same method to both. That is the error. The instruction lines describe different jobs, and the difference decides answers.

True/False/Not Given asks about information — verifiable facts stated in the passage. Yes/No/Not Given asks about claims — the writer's opinions, arguments and beliefs. One asks is this so? The other asks does the writer think this?

If you have already worked through the True/False/Not Given method, most of the machinery transfers. What follows is what changes, and why it changes the answers.

Why the distinction is not academic

Consider a passage containing this sentence:

Critics argue that the policy has failed, though the evidence remains contested.

Now the statement: The policy has failed.

Under True/False/Not Given, this is NOT GIVEN. The passage does not tell you whether the policy failed; it tells you that critics say so and the evidence is disputed.

Under Yes/No/Not Given, the same statement is also NOT GIVEN — but for a different reason. The writer has reported someone else's claim without endorsing it. The writer's own view is absent.

Change the sentence slightly:

Although critics argue that the policy has failed, the evidence clearly shows otherwise.

Now The policy has failed is NO under Yes/No/Not Given. The writer has taken a side, signalled by clearly shows otherwise. Under True/False/Not Given the same statement would be FALSE.

The two tasks converge often enough that sloppy method survives for a while, then produces a run of wrong answers on the questions that separate Band 6.5 from Band 7.5.

Write the right word

Before any strategy: use the words the task asks for. If the instruction says YES/NO/NOT GIVEN and you write TRUE, the answer is marked wrong even when your reasoning was perfect. This is not a rare slip — it happens to candidates who practised one task type more than the other and answered on autopilot.

If it helps, write the three permitted words at the top of the question block before you start.

The three verdicts, defined precisely

YES — the statement matches what the writer thinks. The writer's position and the statement agree, though the wording will differ.

NO — the statement contradicts what the writer thinks. The writer holds the opposite view, or explicitly rejects the statement.

NOT GIVEN — the writer expresses no view on this. Either the topic is absent, or it appears only as somebody else's opinion that the writer neither endorses nor rejects.

That third definition carries most of the difficulty, so it is worth stating the test plainly: NOT GIVEN means you cannot find the writer's opinion, not that you cannot find the topic. A passage can discuss a subject at length and still never say what the writer believes about it.

Find the opinion language

Yes/No/Not Given questions live wherever the writer stops reporting and starts judging. Learning to spot that shift is most of the skill.

The writer's own view is usually signalled by evaluative language. Adjectives and adverbs that carry judgement — misguided, remarkable, insufficient, surprisingly, unfortunately, rightly, unconvincing. If a paragraph is full of neutral reporting verbs and then one loaded adjective appears, that adjective is where the opinion lives.

Modality tells you how strongly. Must, should, cannot signal conviction. May, might, appears to, it is possible that signal hedging. A statement asserting certainty against a hedged passage is often NO, because the strength does not match even when the direction does.

Attribution distances the writer. Some researchers claim, it has been suggested, proponents argue, according to. These constructions hand the opinion to somebody else. Unless the writer then agrees or disagrees, the writer's view is NOT GIVEN.

Concession reveals the writer's side. Although, while, despite, admittedly, it is true that ... but. The structure concedes a point and then overrides it. Whatever comes after the but is what the writer actually thinks — and the conceded part is a trap for candidates who stop reading at the comma.

A method you can repeat under time pressure

Step 1 — read the statement and identify what is being claimed about whom. Underline the subject and the judgement. "Government funding for the arts is inadequate" claims inadequacy, and the subject is government funding.

Step 2 — find the region of the passage. Questions follow passage order, so the answer to question 5 sits between the answers to 4 and 6. Scan for the topic, not for matching words. The passage will paraphrase.

Step 3 — read the whole sentence and the one after it. Opinion frequently sits in the follow-up sentence. The first states a position; the second reveals whether the writer holds it.

Step 4 — ask whose voice this is. If it is attributed to somebody else and never taken up by the writer, you are heading for NOT GIVEN regardless of what the attributed opinion says.

Step 5 — match direction and strength. Same direction and comparable strength is YES. Opposite direction is NO. No locatable writer's view is NOT GIVEN.

Step 6 — commit and move on. A Yes/No/Not Given item should take around a minute. If you are past two minutes, mark it, guess, and come back if time allows. The time management strategies guide covers the wider budget — you have 60 minutes for 40 questions and no transfer time in Reading, so a single question is never worth four.

The traps, and what each looks like

The unendorsed claim. The passage reports a view the statement matches, but the writer never adopts it. Answer: NOT GIVEN. Candidates answer YES because they found matching content. The fix is Step 4.

The strength mismatch. Passage says may contribute to; statement says is the main cause of. Direction agrees, strength does not. Answer: NO. The absolutes to watch in statements are all, never, only, the most, always, entirely.

The reversed concession. Passage: "While the technology is expensive, its long-term savings are undeniable." Statement: "The writer believes the technology is too costly." Answer: NO. The writer conceded cost and then dismissed it as the deciding factor.

The plausible extension. The statement says something a reasonable person would infer from the passage, but the writer never says it. Answer: NOT GIVEN. This is the hardest one to accept, because the inference feels obviously right. IELTS is testing what is on the page, not what follows from it.

The unrelated true statement. The statement is factually correct in the real world and the passage says nothing about it. Answer: NOT GIVEN. Your knowledge of the subject is not evidence.

Do not be afraid of NOT GIVEN

Candidates systematically under-choose NOT GIVEN, because selecting it feels like admitting defeat. In practice the three answers are distributed fairly evenly across a task, so if you finish a set of seven questions having chosen NOT GIVEN once, look again at the ones you were unsure about.

The confidence to choose it comes from having a positive test rather than a negative feeling. You are not choosing NOT GIVEN because you failed to find the answer. You are choosing it because you found the topic, read the writer's treatment of it, and established that the writer's own view is absent. That is a finding, not a failure.

Where these questions appear

Yes/No/Not Given is far more common in Academic Reading, and it clusters in passages that argue rather than describe — opinion pieces, review articles, essays on policy or method. Passage 3 is the usual home, which is also where time pressure peaks.

General Training candidates meet it less often, mostly in Section 3, since the earlier sections use more procedural and workplace texts. If you are still deciding between the two tests, Academic versus General Training sets out the wider differences.

Practice that actually improves this

Doing more Yes/No/Not Given questions and checking the key teaches you very little, because the key does not explain the reasoning. Do this instead.

After marking, take every question you got wrong and write one sentence naming the trap: unendorsed claim, strength mismatch, reversed concession, plausible extension. Within a few tests, one or two categories will dominate your errors. That is what to drill.

Then take any argumentative passage and, without looking at questions at all, go through it marking every place the writer's own voice appears — every evaluative adjective, every concession, every hedge. Ten minutes of that trains the exact perception the task tests, and it transfers directly to matching headings, which also depends on separating what a paragraph reports from what it argues.

The short version

Check the instruction line and write the right three words. Ask whose opinion you are reading before you ask whether it matches. Match direction and strength, not vocabulary. Treat attributed claims as NOT GIVEN unless the writer takes them up. And choose NOT GIVEN with confidence when the writer's view genuinely is not on the page — because a third of the time, it is not.