Tips and advice on how to do well on the Matching Information question of the IELTS reading exam. For more English tutorials, please visit: https://www.thelecturette.com

1. Matching Information
Reading: Tips & Strategy

2. Reading
• Content
• What do you need to do?
• What does it test?
• Examples
• Common problems
• Tips and advice
• Strategy

3. Reading
• What do you need to do?
• You will be asked to match statements to
paragraphs in a reading text.
• The statements could be reasons,
descriptions, summaries, definitions, facts,
or explanations.

4. Reading
• What do you need to do?
• You do not need to understand the whole
paragraph, but you need to be able to find
specific information in a paragraph and
match it to one of the statements.
• You can often find the answer in a phrase or
a complete sentence rather than in a single
word.

5. Reading
• What does it test?
• The ability to skim the text in order to get
the general meaning of each paragraph.
• The ability to scan for keywords within a
specific paragraph. These words will be
synonyms and paraphrases rather than
keywords from the question statements.

6. • Example
Reading

7. Reading
• Common Problems
• Matching paragraphs takes time. The
answers are scattered around the text and
they don’t come in order. This means that
students need to read the entire text.
• The answer may not be the main idea of
the paragraph, so looking at the first and
the last few lines of each paragraph usually
does not work. This means that skimming
does not lead to the answer.

8. Reading
• More Common
Problems
• Often a lot of irrelevant information needs to
be considered and ignored before getting to
the answer. This needs to happen fast.
• Some paragraphs contain multiple answers
while others don’t contain any answers.

9. Reading
• Tips
• Do information matching questions last.
Starting with other question types about the
same text will allow you to already become
familiar with the text, which will help you find
the answers more easily later.
• Try to look for names, places, and numbers
from the statement because they are often
easier to find in a text.
• Beware of synonyms, so, for example, about
50% might show up in the text as
approximately half.

10. Reading
• Strategy
• Read the instructions carefully.
• Read the questions first. Consider how you
could paraphrase the statements or how you
could use synonyms.
• Read each question statement again and try to
predict which paragraph could contain the
answer.

11. Reading
• More Strategy
• Scan the text paragraph you think might
contain the answer for synonyms and if you
find them, underline them.
• Check the question statement again and
mark the answer if correct. If you cannot find
it, move on.