Matching headings

Choose the heading that captures what each paragraph is about. The main idea, not a detail in it.

You answer with: A Roman numeral from the heading list
Typical group: 5–8 questions
Answer order: Does not follow the passage

The instructions, word for word as the test writes them

The passage has six paragraphs, A–F.

Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.

Write the correct number, i–ix, next to Questions 1–6.

What this task is

A boxed list of headings, numbered i, ii, iii, always shown before the passage questions. Each paragraph gets the heading that states its main idea. There are always more headings than paragraphs, typically three spare, and no heading is used twice.

It is a summary test in disguise. Can you say what job a paragraph does, rather than listing things it mentions?

The traps

These are built in on purpose. Know them by name and half the danger is gone.

The detail dressed as a heading

The classic distractor names something genuinely present in the paragraph that is not what the paragraph is about. One accurate detail does not make a main idea. This is the trap the spare headings exist to set.

First-sentence worship

Topic sentences help, but paragraphs can open with a link back to the previous idea. Judge the paragraph by where its weight lands, not by line one.

What to do next time

Read the paragraph, look away, and summarise it in your own five words. Then find the heading nearest your summary. Reading the headings first invites word-matching.
Do the paragraphs you are surest of first. Every heading you place shrinks the list for the rest.
Torn between two headings? Ask which one the whole paragraph serves. A heading matched by two sentences loses to one matched by six.

Now meet it under a clock. Start a free mock. Every matching headings question you get wrong comes back with the sentence that proves the answer, and the reason the trap was tempting.