IELTS Reading Yes / No / Not Given: tips and strategy
Match claims to writer's views.
IELTS Reading yes no not given questions test whether you can identify the writer's own views and claims, rather than the facts a passage reports. Marks are lost when candidates answer from their own opinion on the issue, or when they treat a view the writer describes but then rejects as if it were the writer's position. The skill is reading for stance, not for information.
What you see on screen
Each statement offers YES, NO, or NOT GIVEN buttons. You match claims against the writer's opinions in the passage, not against outside facts.
How it is marked
One mark per statement, following passage order, with no deduction for errors. YES means the writer's stated view agrees, however odd the claim sounds.
How long to spend
Allow about a minute per statement within your roughly 20 minutes per passage, and a little longer on argumentative passages where the writer's position develops across several sentences. If a statement still seems undecided, choose between the two most likely answers, flag it and return once the set is done.
Strategy
- Hunt stance verbs — argues, maintains, concedes, disputes, dismisses — and hedges such as 'may well' or 'arguably'. They mark where the writer takes a side.
- If the writer reports a topic without evaluating it, choose NOT GIVEN, however relevant the statement feels.
- Separate NO from NOT GIVEN the same way as FALSE: NO needs a line where the writer states the opposite, not an absence.
- Track whose view is being reported. A view attributed to critics, researchers or 'some observers' is not the writer's own unless the writer endorses it.
Traps that cost marks
Answering from your own opinion on the issue instead of the writer's stated position.
Crediting the writer with a view they only quoted from someone else.
Worked example
It is often said that abolishing entry charges is the surest way to widen a museum's audience. The evidence does not support this. When charges are removed, visitor numbers usually rise, but the additional visitors tend to be people who already visited museums and now simply come more often. Reaching new audiences requires something harder: exhibitions and outreach designed with those audiences in mind. That said, I would not argue for bringing charges back where they have been dropped. Free entry has a symbolic value that is difficult to measure but real.
Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in the passage? Choose YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this 1. Removing entry charges is an effective way to attract people who do not usually visit museums. 2. Free entry offers benefits that cannot easily be measured. 3. Most museums that removed their charges later reintroduced them.
Answer: 1 NO, 2 YES, 3 NOT GIVEN
Statement 1 is tempting as YES because the opening sentence says almost exactly this, but it is a view the writer reports ('It is often said') and then rejects ('The evidence does not support this'), so the answer is NO. Statement 2 matches the final sentence, where the writer calls the symbolic value 'difficult to measure but real'. Statement 3 is NOT GIVEN: the writer mentions charges being dropped but says nothing about how many museums brought them back.
An original example written for this guide, not taken from a published test.
Questions candidates ask
- What is the difference between Yes/No/Not Given and True/False/Not Given?
- True/False/Not Given compares statements with factual information in the passage. Yes/No/Not Given compares them with the writer's views or claims. The reasoning is similar, but the target is different: with YES/NO you are asking whether the writer agrees, not whether something happened. Always check the instruction line, because choosing TRUE or FALSE when the question asks for YES or NO is marked wrong.
- What kind of passage usually has Yes/No/Not Given questions?
- They appear with passages where the writer argues a position or evaluates other people's ideas, such as discursive articles, reviews or opinion pieces. In Academic Reading these are often among the longer, more complex passages later in the test. If a passage is purely descriptive, with no evaluation by the writer, you are more likely to meet True/False/Not Given than Yes/No/Not Given.
- Do Yes/No/Not Given answers follow the order of the passage?
- Yes. As with True/False/Not Given, the statements follow the order of the passage. This helps when a writer's view is spread over a paragraph: once you have located statements either side of a difficult one, you know which lines to read closely. If the writer says nothing about the point in that section, NOT GIVEN is likely to be the answer.
Now try it under exam conditions.
Practise Yes / No / Not Given questions