IELTS Matching Information which paragraph contains what

What the task asks

You are given statements describing information, and a passage with lettered paragraphs. You identify which paragraph each piece of information appears in. A paragraph may contain more than one answer, and some paragraphs may contain none.

The method

1. 01

   Do this type last

   It requires the widest search of any reading task. Doing the ordered types first means you have already read most of the passage and know roughly where things are.

2. 02

   Classify what you are looking for

   The statement usually names a KIND of information: an example, a comparison, a reason, a definition, a reference to a date. Knowing you are hunting for a comparison is faster than hunting for a topic.

3. 03

   Scan for the shape, not the words

   A description of a cause looks like because, led to, resulted in. An example looks like for instance, such as. Those shapes are visible without reading closely.

4. 04

   Accept repeats

   Unless the instruction says otherwise a letter can be the answer more than once, and often is.

Worked examples

Real questions from the practice bank with the reasoning written out. Cover the answer, decide, then read the explanation. Getting it right for the wrong reason is the thing that does not survive test day.

Where the marks go

How is matching information different from matching features?

This is the most confused pair in the Reading paper, and the confusion is mechanical rather than conceptual. Both question types ask you to write a single capital letter. On a finished answer sheet they look identical, so candidates apply the wrong method to the wrong one and cannot work out afterwards what went wrong.

The test that settles it takes two seconds: ask what the letters stand for. Here in matching information the letters are the paragraphs of the passage, printed as A, B, C down the margin. There is no box of options anywhere, because the passage is the option list. In matching features the letters are in a printed box above the questions, with a researcher, a country, a theory or a category next to each.

The plain English version is that matching information asks where and matching features asks whose. A statement about a claim on soil degradation is a matching information question if you must decide which paragraph contains it, and a matching features question if you must decide which of five scientists made it.

The methods then pull apart completely. Matching features hands you proper nouns, so you can mark every option in the passage before reading any statement closely, and capital letters mid sentence are findable at skimming speed. Matching information hands you nothing to anchor on, which is why it is the slower of the two and why the compensating technique is different.

There is one more practical difference. On matching features the options are a closed printed set, so you can see how many there are. On matching information the option count is however many paragraphs the passage happens to have, which in this bank runs up to nine. A wider option set with no proper nouns in it is the honest reason this type feels punishing.

Why passage order does not help on matching information

On most reading tasks the question number is quietly a location hint. Answer 3 in paragraph C and answer 5 in paragraph E, and answer 4 is between them. That narrowing is doing more work than most candidates realise, and matching information deliberately removes it. Question 27 can be answered by paragraph A and question 28 by paragraph G.

It is worth being precise about what that costs, because the usual advice stops at do not expect order. What you lose is the ability to stop searching. On an ordered type you know when you have gone too far. Here there is no too far, so every question is a search of the whole passage unless you give yourself a different way to stop.

The replacement is to hunt for the shape of the information rather than its topic. Read what the statement is describing and name the kind: a reason, a comparison, an example, a definition, a result, a reference to a date. Those kinds have surface signatures that are visible without close reading. A cause reads as because, led to, resulted in, owing to. An example reads as for instance, such as, one case. A comparison reads as whereas, by contrast, more than.

That is a genuinely different search. Topic words are paraphrased in the passage and therefore hard to find; the connective that marks a comparison is not paraphrased, because it is grammar rather than vocabulary. Scanning for the grammar is faster and it fails less often.

The second thing that replaces order is elimination, but only when the instruction permits it. In this bank 15 of the 81 matching information sets print an explicit note that any letter may be used only once, and 66 print nothing of the kind. In those 15 a confident answer genuinely removes a paragraph from the pool. In the other 66 it does not, and crossing it off anyway means you have hidden the right answer from yourself.

Where the specific detail hides

The defining feature of this question type is that the information you are hunting is usually not what its paragraph is about. That is the trap built into the design, and it is the exact inverse of matching headings, where the answer is the paragraph's main idea by definition.

So a paragraph whose main subject is funding arrangements can be the answer to a question about a comparison between two cities, because the comparison appears in one clause inside it. A candidate who has just finished a matching headings set and is still reading for main ideas will skim straight past that clause, having correctly judged that the paragraph is not about cities.

This is the reason the two types are worth practising apart rather than together. They train opposite reading behaviours, and the switch between them inside a single paper is where the marks go. If you have just done headings on a passage, say the switch out loud to yourself before starting the information set.

It also explains why several paragraphs will feel plausible on almost every question. They feel plausible because they touch the subject. Only one contains the specific information described, with every element of it present. A statement naming a comparison between two things needs both things and the comparison in the same paragraph, not the subject discussed nearby.

The discipline that follows is to check the full match before you commit rather than stopping at the first paragraph that feels right. That costs a few seconds per question and it is the difference between a set that scores four out of five and one that scores two.

Is matching information worth practising separately?

It is close to unavoidable, which settles the question. Of the 81 full papers in this practice bank, 76 carry a matching information set, and that includes every one of the 41 Academic papers and 35 of the 40 General Training ones. In total the type accounts for 376 questions here.

Unlike the other two matching types, it does not lean heavily to one track. The questions split 199 on Academic papers against 177 on General Training ones, which is close to even. Compare that with matching headings, where 244 of 280 questions sit on Academic papers, or matching features, which leans the other way at 242 General Training against 141 Academic.

As ever, that is the distribution of this bank and not of the real exam, because the test owners do not publish theirs. What it supports is a scheduling decision rather than a prediction: whichever paper you are sitting, this type is likely to be on it, so the practice time is not a gamble.

The thing worth rehearsing is not the method, which is short enough to memorise in a minute. It is the discipline of leaving the set until the other question sets on that passage are finished, and of abandoning a question that has resisted for a minute with a marked guess rather than feeding it more of the hour.

Both of those only get tested under a clock, inside a whole paper, with the other types competing for the same 60 minutes. All 81 full reading tests are built that way, and every answer carries a written explanation of why it is the answer.

Matching information against the other two matching types

All three ask you to write a letter, which is why they blur. Ask what the letters stand for. Counts are from this practice bank of 81 papers, not from the real exam.

Frequently asked questions