IELTS Online: Course

Sentence Completion questions

Sentence Completion questions test your ability to find details to complete a sentence. There are two types of Sentence Completion questions:

• filling in the blank space in a sentence
• matching one half of a sentence to the other half.

Let’s now look at examples of these two types of Sentence Completion questions.

Example 1 – Filling in the blank space

Read the two Sentence Completion questions below. They are the same questions as the Short Answer Questions 9 and 10 we have just looked at, but they have been put in the form of a Sentence Completion question. Click on the button to read the passage again and answer Questions 11 and 12. Type no more than three words for each answer. Then click on the Check button to check your answers.

For the other type of Sentence Completion question, you need to match one half of a sentence to the other half. Let’s look at an example.

Example 2 – Matching sentence halves

Note that all of the possible answers are in the same grammatical form. In other words, they all start with verbs (is, has grown, was, has had, and is). This is very common for matching Sentence Completion statements, and is done to make the questions easier to read, but it also makes the questions harder to answer because you can’t use your knowledge of grammar to help you choose the correct answer.

Now let's look at another Specific Information question type - True/False/Not Given.