False means the passage contradicts the statement. Not Given means the passage never settles it. The test that separates them is physical: try to underline the words in the passage that make the statement wrong. If you can underline them, the answer is False. If you cannot, and you are filling the gap with what sounds reasonable, the answer is Not Given.
That is the whole rule, and candidates still lose marks on it at every sitting, because the two feel identical while the clock is running: a statement you cannot prove feels wrong, and wrong feels like False.
What follows is the questions candidates actually ask about this, in the order they ask them, with short worked examples written for this article. The last question is the one nobody asks.
What exactly is the difference between False and Not Given?
One is a contradiction, the other is a silence.
IELTS publishes the definitions on its own Academic Reading format page, and they are shorter than any tip you will ever read about them:
True: the statement agrees with the information in the text. False: the statement contradicts the information in the text. Not given: the statement neither agrees with nor contradicts the information in the text.
Everything hangs on one word, contradicts. Two statements contradict each other when they cannot both be true of the same thing at the same time. If the passage and the statement can both be true, there is no contradiction, and False is not available to you, however unlikely the statement sounds.
Notice what the definition does not say. It does not say False when the statement is untrue in the world. It does not say Not Given when the topic is missing from the passage. It says nothing about matching words at all.
What is the one test that settles it?
Point at the contradiction. If your finger has nowhere to land, the answer is Not Given.
Here is a passage sentence written for this article: "The library opened in 1954 in a converted school and moved to its present building in 1990."
First statement: "The library has been in the same building since it opened." You can underline the contradiction here, and it is not a single word. "Moved to its present building in 1990" cannot be true at the same time as "the same building since it opened". The two sentences are about the same library and the same span of years, and only one of them can stand. False.
Second statement: "The school it first occupied had closed the year before." Read the passage sentence again. It tells you the library opened in a converted school, and it says nothing about when that school closed, or whether it closed at all. Nothing to underline. Not Given.
Third statement: "The library has moved at least once." The passage puts the move in 1990, so the statement agrees with it. True.
Do the test in that order every time. Hunt for the contradiction first, and only call it Not Given once the hunt has failed. Candidates who decide Not Given first never look properly, and the marks they lose are the ones where the contradiction sat two lines further down, in words they were not expecting.
Is it False if the passage says something close but not the same?
Only when the difference cannot be true both ways. A different quantity or a different scope is usually a contradiction. A softer or stronger word usually is not.
Take the quantity first. The passage says "most of the volunteers had worked on a previous survey" and the statement says "all of the volunteers had worked on a previous survey". Those cannot both be true, because "most" means some had not. False, and you can underline the word that does it.
Now take the strength. The passage says "the scheme may be extended to other cities" and the statement says "the scheme will be extended to other cities". Ask the same question: can they both be true? They can. Something that may happen can also be something that will happen, and the passage has declined to commit, which is not the same as ruling it out. There is nothing to underline, so the answer is Not Given.
This is the pair that rewards the test and punishes instinct. "All" after "most" feels the same size as "will" after "may", and it is not.
What if the statement is obviously true in real life?
It is still Not Given unless the passage says it.
The same IELTS page tells candidates to be careful not to use any information they already know about the topic of the text, and this is the question type where that line earns its keep, because a strong general knowledge quietly supplies the sentence the passage never wrote.
Say a passage describes an engineer who designed three bridges in the 1930s, and the statement reads "She studied engineering at university." Almost certainly true of a real person. Completely absent from the passage. Not Given, and the candidate who answers True here has not misread a thing: they have answered a different question, the one about the world.
Do the questions follow the order of the passage?
Yes, for this question type, and it is the most useful fact about it. IDP, one of the test owners, states it plainly: the information in the text follows the order of the questions, so what you need for the first statement appears before what you need for the second.
Use it as a search boundary rather than as a rule about answers. If you settled question 4 in the third paragraph and question 6 in the fifth, question 5 lives in between. Read that stretch twice. If nothing in it agrees with the statement and nothing contradicts it, you have your answer, and the answer is Not Given.
That boundary is really a time instrument. The candidate who does not trust it reads the whole passage again for one statement, loses four minutes, and arrives at the last set with blanks. Those blanks are a pacing problem wearing a reading problem's clothes. They will be marked as if you did not know the material, and next week you will study the wrong thing because of it.
The order tells you where to look. It never tells you what the answer is, and a statement whose evidence sits exactly where it should still has to pass the contradiction test.
How many Not Given answers should I expect in one passage?
There is no published number, and carrying one into the test will cost you marks. IELTS answers "how many questions are there?" for this task type with a single word on its own format page: variable.
So the candidate who has decided that a set of seven "usually" holds two Not Givens will force the third one into False, and will do it at the end, under time pressure, on the statement they understood least. Counting is not reading. Answer each statement on its own evidence and let the totals fall where they fall.
Is this the same as Yes, No, Not Given?
Same logic, different object. True, False and Not Given ask about the information in the text. Yes, No and Not Given ask about the writer's views or claims, and IELTS defines No as a statement that contradicts the writer's view or claim.
In practice you stop asking "does the passage state this?" and start asking "does the writer think this?". The evidence moves from facts to the words that carry an opinion: surprisingly, fails to, remarkable, merely. A writer who calls a policy a modest improvement has a view, and a statement that the policy transformed the sector contradicts it.
One small thing costs whole marks anyway. Write the three words the instructions name, because a set headed Yes, No, Not Given is asking for those words, and an answer sheet is marked on what is written on it.
Which of your right answers were guesses?
You do not know, and that is the expensive part.
A Not Given you guessed correctly looks exactly like a Not Given you reasoned your way to. It hides a habit that will surface on a different paper, on a day that counts.
The fix costs two seconds a question. As you answer, write sure, think so or guess beside it, then mark the paper and read the "guess, and right" column before anything else. It is the same mark that turns one practice paper into a list of named gaps, and on this question type it is the only way to tell reading from luck.
Sort the misses the same way, by what you did rather than by what the passage was about. "Answered False where the passage was silent" is a habit, and a habit can be drilled in twenty minutes with seven statements and a timer. "Reading: 28 out of 40" cannot be drilled at all.
That is how our own IELTS Reading papers file it. EduZen AI records a wrong Not Given as "answers True or False where the passage is simply silent", and the mirror image as "answers Not Given when the passage does say it, in different words", so the next session is built from the habit instead of from the number. Nothing is marked until you finish the paper, because a candidate who learns at question 4 that they misread the first passage reads the second one differently, and the score at the end describes a paper nobody sat.
If you would rather have that log kept for you while you practise, you can start studying for free, no credit card required.