TRUE/FALSE/NOT GIVEN with quantifiers, plus a timing crisis in Passage 2
A passage reads: "Between 2017 and 2021, beavers were reintroduced at three licensed sites in Devon. An independent review found that 60 per cent of farmers surveyed within the trial area reported damage to drainage ditches; the remainder reported no financial impact. The review also noted that a compensation scheme had been proposed but had not been tested, and that the trial's effect on fish migration remained unmeasured."
Questions 14–16 are TRUE/FALSE/NOT GIVEN. 14. All farmers surveyed in the trial area reported damage to drainage ditches. 15. A compensation scheme was trialled alongside the reintroduction. 16. Beavers caused more damage in Devon than in other English counties.
Candidate B answers 14 as NOT GIVEN, reasoning: "I couldn't find a sentence saying every farmer was surveyed." They answer 15 FALSE and 16 NOT GIVEN. They have now spent 9 minutes on questions 14–16 and have 11 minutes left to finish Passage 2, which contains 13 questions in total, including a matching-headings task and a sentence-completion set.
1. Question 14: give the correct answer and explain where the candidate's reasoning went wrong.
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Answer: FALSE.
The passage states that 60 per cent of farmers surveyed reported damage and that "the remainder reported no financial impact". That second clause is decisive: it accounts for the whole surveyed group, so the text is saying that 40 per cent did not report ditch damage. A statement claiming all farmers reported damage is therefore contradicted, and contradiction is FALSE, not NOT GIVEN.
The candidate's error is a classic one: they looked for a sentence confirming or denying that every farmer was surveyed, and, not finding one, retreated to NOT GIVEN. But the statement under test is about reported damage, not about survey coverage. Test the statement as written, not a nearby statement you wish it had made.
A working procedure:
- Identify the claim's load-bearing words - here "All".
- Find the sentence that addresses the same fact.
- Ask: does the text say the opposite (FALSE), say the same thing (TRUE), or simply not address it (NOT GIVEN)?
Absolute quantifiers (all, none, always, only) are the most frequent source of FALSE answers because passages typically use hedged quantities like "most" or "60 per cent".
2. Contrast questions 15 and 16: why is one FALSE and the other NOT GIVEN, when both statements involve something the passage does not affirm?
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15 FALSE; 16 NOT GIVEN - the difference is whether the text denies the statement or is merely silent.
- Q15: the passage says the scheme "had been proposed but had not been tested". The statement says it was trialled. That is a direct denial: FALSE. The candidate got this one right.
- Q16: the statement compares Devon with other English counties. The passage never mentions any other county. Silence on a comparison is NOT GIVEN - the text does not say Devon was worse, and it does not say it was not. A comparison cannot be FALSE unless the passage explicitly contradicts it (e.g. "damage in Devon was lower than in every other county").
The trap is emotional: candidates feel that an unmentioned comparison should be "false because there's no evidence". That instinct belongs to a different test. In IELTS Reading, absence of evidence is NOT GIVEN. Reserve FALSE for cases where a paraphrase of the statement would directly clash with a sentence in the passage.
A quick check that works under time pressure: try to write the contradicting sentence from the passage. If you can, it is FALSE. If you are inventing what the passage "would probably say", it is NOT GIVEN.
3. With 11 minutes left and 10 questions remaining (including matching headings), what is the best strategy, and why?
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Strategy: stop investing in questions already answered, secure the cheap marks, and never leave a blank.
Concretely:
- Do the sentence-completion set first. It is local: a keyword from each stem can be scanned for, and answers are copied words. This yields marks in 4–5 minutes.
- Then matching headings. It is passage-wide and slow, so it gets the remaining time, not the first time. Read the first and last sentence of each paragraph rather than the whole paragraph.
- Cap each question at roughly 60–70 seconds. With 10 questions in 11 minutes, a single three-minute paragraph is a decision to lose two other marks.
- Fill every gap, even with a guessed word from the right paragraph. There is no negative marking.
Why the current position is already costly: 9 minutes for three TRUE/FALSE/NOT GIVEN items is three times the sustainable rate (about 1 minute per item across a 60-minute, 40-question paper). The candidate has been re-reading to find certainty. Certainty is not available for every item; the test rewards calibrated decisions - commit, move, and return only if time remains at the end.