About Summary Completion Tasks

Summary completion tasks consist of complete sentences that are connected together grammatically. You need to carefully read and understand the summary and locate the relevant part of the passage for the answer.

The answers to Summary completion tasks in Reading may or may not be in the serial order of the text. There is always a heading in these questions, and they help you look at the right part of the text for answers. This question type is the one that always comes in the exam. Yes, it is always there in a Reading exam. Therefore, we better learn to master this particular task.

There are two types of Summary Completion tasks – one with a box of possible answers and the other without any option, just like a gap-filling question.

1. Summary Completion without box

In this question type, you need to fill in the gaps with the words from the passage. This task is easy because you read and understand the text and fill in the blanks with the passage words. The words you choose should accurately fill each gap, and correct word/s or answers will make the sentences in the task meaningful and grammatically correct. You will realise you’ve made a mistake if the sentence formed after gap-filling is grammatically inaccurate or meaningless.

2. Summary Completion with box

In this type of summary completion question, you need to read and understand the text and choose the appropriate words given in the box. Instead of selecting words from the passage, you will be selecting words from the box of options, and you will write the letters- A, B, C, D in your answer sheet. If you write words instead of letters, the answers will be marked wrong.

You have to choose the words from the option that may be actual words from the passage or synonyms of words in the passage. In a way, this task assesses your vocabulary skill. Among the two types of tasks, ‘Summary Completion with a box’ is comparatively more difficult because finding similar words from the passage in the option may be pretty challenging.

Secrets Unlocked

Now that you know the question types and how to answer them, I’m going to reveal a big secret of Summary completion tasks that will save you a lot of time in the exam. There’s an easy way to know how many paragraph/s to read to find answers to these tasks.

If the summary completion task is given as a one-paragraph question, you must know that the answers will only be inside one paragraph of the passage.

For Example, you can see a one-paragraph summary completion question below. For this task, you have to locate a paragraph in the passage that will give you answers, and you don’t need to read more than one paragraph. Remember, the title in the question will help you find that particular paragraph for the answer.

But if the question is in two-paragraph form, you have to know that the answers will be in more than one paragraph, and you may have to read 2-3 paragraphs or sometimes even more.

For Example, below, you can see a two-paragraph summary completion question. For this task, you will look for answers in more than one paragraph, and sometimes, you may have to read the whole text as well.

by Merina Shrestha

About the Author

Merina is an experienced English Tutor, Exam Trainer and Head of the IELTS Teaching Department at BeatMockTest. Merina is also a Freelance Examiner and Materials Reviewer for IELTS Resources.

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