IELTS Reading: Sentence completion
You complete a sentence with words taken from the passage, within a stated limit — usually "NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER". More marks are lost here to the word limit than to comprehension.
The word limit is a rule, not a guideline
Three words where two are allowed is marked wrong, however correct the meaning. Count what you write, every time.
- A hyphenated word counts as one. "Well-known" is one word.
- A number counts as one item where the instruction allows "AND/OR A NUMBER".
- Articles count. If "the survey" is three words over a two-word limit with another word, drop the article — it is rarely needed.
- Do not change the form. Copy the word as printed. Correcting a plural to a singular makes it wrong.
Finding the gap
- Decide what kind of word is missing — noun, verb, number, adjective — from the grammar around the gap.
- Take the unparaphrasable anchor from the sentence and scan for it.
- Read the passage sentence fully; the answer is usually within it, not nearby.
- Copy the words exactly, then count them.
These follow passage order, so each answer lies after the previous one. If a candidate word appears earlier than your last answer, you are probably in the wrong place.
Sentence completion — FAQs
2 questions
No. The answer must be words taken from the passage, spelled as printed.
Yes, and that is a useful check: if the completed sentence is ungrammatical, the answer is wrong.
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Written from the test board's own published material and checked on 1 October 2026.