The lessons
Everything the test can ask you
IELTS has exactly 24 question types: 10 in Listening, 14 in Reading. One short lesson each. All free, no account needed.
Sitting PTE, Duolingo or TOEFL instead? The skills overlap a lot, and most of what these lessons teach carries over.
Start here
How IELTS Listening really works
Four parts, four different ways of being hard. What each one asks of you, and how to spend the pauses.
Read the Listening lesson →How IELTS Reading really works
Three passages that get harder on purpose, and three question types that quietly ignore passage order.
Read the Reading lesson →How band scores convert
The score-to-band tables, the official rounding rule, and one honest warning.
See the tables →The question types, one lesson each
This split is the real one. True/False/Not Given lives only in Reading, whatever a practice book told you.
Listening
10 types- 1 Form completion Typed words and numbers
- 2 Note completion Typed words and numbers
- 3 Table completion Typed words and numbers
- 4 Flow-chart completion Typed words and numbers, occasionally letters from a box
- 5 Sentence completion Typed words and numbers
- 6 Short answer Typed words and numbers
- 7 Multiple choice One letter: A, B or C
- 8 Multiple choice, two or more answers Two letters (or three from a longer list), in any order
- 9 Matching One letter per question, from a shared list
- 10 Map, plan and diagram labelling A letter per location, or occasionally a typed word
Reading
14 types- 1 Multiple choice One letter: A, B, C or D
- 2 Multiple choice, two or more answers Two letters (or three from a longer list), in any order
- 3 True / False / Not Given TRUE, FALSE or NOT GIVEN
- 4 Yes / No / Not Given YES, NO or NOT GIVEN
- 5 Matching information A paragraph letter
- 6 Matching headings A Roman numeral from the heading list
- 7 Matching features One letter per statement, from a shared list
- 8 Matching sentence endings One letter per sentence beginning
- 9 Sentence completion Words copied verbatim from the passage
- 10 Summary completion Words copied verbatim from the passage
- 11 Summary completion from a word list A letter from the word box
- 12 Note, table and flow-chart completion Words copied verbatim from the passage
- 13 Diagram label completion Words copied verbatim from the passage
- 14 Short answer Words and numbers copied verbatim from the passage