IELTS Reading Matching Sentence Endings: Strategy and Practice

Matching sentence endings questions give you the first half of several sentences and a longer list of possible endings. You choose the ending that completes each sentence so that it matches the meaning of the passage. There are more endings than you need.

The type appears in both Academic and General Training Reading. In Academic Reading it is common on the final, argument-based passage.

What it tests

• Understanding main ideas and relationships in the passage: causes, results, purposes, conditions.
• Recognising paraphrase of a full sentence or idea.
• Using grammar to check that a beginning and an ending fit together.

Step-by-step strategy

1. Read the sentence beginnings and underline the key words. Beginnings usually follow passage order.
2. Skim the endings to get a sense of the options, but don't match yet.
3. Locate each beginning in the passage and read the surrounding sentences carefully.
4. Predict how the sentence should finish in your own words.
5. Find the ending that matches your prediction.
6. Check the grammar. The full sentence must read correctly: verb forms, singular and plural, and linking words must agree.
7. Reread the completed sentence against the passage to confirm the meaning, not just the topic.

Common traps

• Grammatical but false. An ending fits the beginning perfectly as English, but the passage does not say it.
• True but for a different beginning. An ending is correct information from the passage, but it completes a different sentence, or none of them.
• Reversed cause and effect. The passage says A led to B; an ending says B led to A.
• Borrowed words. An ending reuses a phrase from near the right part of the passage but changes its meaning.
• A dropped hedge. The passage says something can happen or happens in some cases; the ending says it always happens.

Try it: mini-example

This passage is original practice material written for Bee English.

Sleep and teenagers

Around puberty, the body clock shifts so that teenagers naturally feel sleepy later at night. Because school still starts early, many get far less sleep than they need. A few schools have experimented with later start times. In those schools, attendance improved, although test results changed only slightly. Researchers also found that phone use in bed made the problem worse, since bright screens delay the release of the hormone that causes sleepiness.

Complete each sentence with the correct ending, A to E.

1. Teenagers tend to go to sleep late because
2. Schools that started later saw
3. Using a phone in bed can

Endings

• A. better attendance among students.
• B. a large rise in exam results.
• C. their body clock changes during puberty.
• D. delay the hormone that makes people sleepy.
• E. they need less sleep than adults.

Answers and explanations

1. C. The body clock "shifts" around puberty, so teenagers feel sleepy later.
   • E is grammatical but false: the passage says teenagers get less sleep than they need, not that they need less.
2. A. "Attendance improved" in schools with later start times.
   • B is grammatical but false: test results "changed only slightly", so there was no large rise.
3. D. Bright screens "delay the release of the hormone that causes sleepiness". Only D fits can grammatically, which confirms the match.

Related guides

• IELTS Reading: complete guide
• Sentence completion
• Matching features
• Grammatical range and accuracy in writing

Sources

• IELTS, Academic Reading format and question types
• IELTS, General Training Reading format