True, False, Not Given: The Complete Method

In this question type you are given a short statement to compare with the text, and you must choose only one of three verdicts. First, separate the three concepts precisely from one another:

• TRUE — the text clearly confirms the statement: the meaning of the statement and the meaning in the text coincide.
• FALSE — the text clearly contradicts the statement: the text contains a fact, number or piece of information that points in the opposite direction.
• NOT GIVEN — the text neither confirms nor contradicts the specific statement. The topic may appear in the text, but there is not enough information to judge that statement.

Let's look at a short example. The text says: The harbour library opened in 1924 and still lends books today. The statement: The library is more than ninety years old. The answer is TRUE, because the date 1924 shows directly that more than ninety years have passed up to the present day. But if the statement were The library is the largest in the region, the answer would be NOT GIVEN, because there is no comparison of size in the text — silence about size neither confirms nor rejects the statement.

Note: the verdict is given not according to how interesting or true the statement is, but only according to the information in the text. You are not judging the statement — you are determining the relationship between the text and the statement.

The point where most marks are lost is the step from the question to the text. Apply these steps in the same order on every question:

1. Mark the keywords in the statement: names, numbers, dates, key terms.
2. Look for their parallel expressions in the text. If the question says more than a century ago, the text will probably have an expression like founded in the 1890s.
3. Read the sentence you found together with the sentence before and the sentence after it: pivot words such as however, although, in fact change the meaning completely.
4. Compare only the meaning — don't look for word-for-word matches; synonyms are the normal rule of this exam.

The golden rule: base your verdict only on the relevant information in the text; sometimes you need to read several sentences together. Valid text-supported inference is allowed, but personal knowledge or a feeling of it seems right to me is not evidence. For TRUE/FALSE, identify support or contradiction; for NOT GIVEN, check whether the information needed to judge the statement is supplied.

These four steps seem slow at first, but they become automatic with repetition — the goal is to carry them out in the exam without thinking, in one rhythm.

The verdict students fear most actually has the simplest logic: NOT GIVEN does not mean a hard question, it means the text is silent. Remember two nuances:

• If one part of the statement is confirmed by the text and the text is silent about the other part, the answer is still NOT GIVEN (if the other part contradicts the text, the answer is FALSE). If the text says Dr Mercer studied bees for ten years, there is not enough evidence for the statement Dr Mercer studied bees for ten years and her findings changed national farming policy: the first half is confirmed, the text is silent about the second half.
• NOT GIVEN does not say the statement is false, either. The text neither supports nor rejects the specific statement; mentioning the topic alone is not enough.

The practical approach is this: use the keywords to find the relevant information and check the necessary context. If it neither confirms nor contradicts the statement, write NOT GIVEN. Spending five minutes hunting for a maybe it's written somewhere else? eats up the time for the whole section. Check whether the relevant context supplies the information needed for the statement, rather than relying on its absence from one sentence.

And let's dispel one more fear: do not assume a particular number of NOT GIVEN answers. But don't look for a distribution law — the order of the answers cannot be predicted, and the logic of "I've written TRUE three times in a row, so I must have missed an NG" is a waste of time. Being afraid of NG and pulling every doubtful answer into TRUE/FALSE costs more: if you are not sure, look in the text for concrete support or contradiction — if you don't find any, write NG.