Reading practice
IELTS Reading Matching Information practice
Match statements to paragraphs.
This page is for doing Matching Information questions: start the drill, then use the routine and the checks below to make each attempt count. For the strategy behind it, read the Matching Information guide.
Practise Matching Information only
4 Matching Information questions from Academic Practice Test 2, with the passage and instructions they were written for. Your answers are saved and marked exactly as in a full section.
- Questions
- 4 questions
- Time
- 10 minutes
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What Matching Information looks like on screen
A list of statements sits on the right, and each needs the letter of the paragraph that contains that piece of information. You choose one letter per statement. Not every paragraph has to be used, and the instructions say when a paragraph letter can be used more than once.
Where you will meet it
Matching information is set in Academic and General Training on passages with lettered paragraphs. Unlike most Reading sets, its statements do not usually follow passage order, so the answers are scattered and the set cannot be worked through from top to bottom. It asks where a specific detail is — a reason, an example, a description — not what a paragraph is mainly about.
A routine for doing a set against the clock
Reading gives you 60 minutes for 40 questions — about 90 seconds a question, including the time spent reading. Decide the set's share before you start, then work it like this:
- Read all the statements first and highlight the most findable word in each.
- Read the passage once from the top, checking each paragraph against the whole list of statements.
- Fill in a letter the moment a paragraph matches a statement, then keep reading; this is one sweep, not a hunt per statement.
- After the sweep, give the leftover statements a targeted search, and guess a letter for any still empty.
Traps when the clock is running
Hunting one statement at a time. Because answers are scattered, searching the whole passage for statement one, then again for statement two, can mean reading it six or seven times.
Treating it like matching headings. The information you need is often a minor detail in the middle of a paragraph, not its main point. Skimming only the first lines misses it.
Spending the passage's time on the last statement. The statements left at the end are left because they are the hardest to find. Guess, flag and leave them if the passage's other sets are still untouched.
Check yourself after the drill
Mark the drill first, then answer these honestly. A pattern across two or three attempts tells you more than any single score.
- Did you find most answers in a single read of the passage, or in several?
- Were the statements you missed about a minor detail rather than a main idea?
- Did the instructions allow a letter to be reused, and did your answers allow for that?
- How many minutes did the set take?