Flow-chart and diagram labelling in IELTS Reading

A flow chart is a summary of the passage that somebody has already written for you, and candidates throw that gift away by reading the passage first. Spend forty seconds on the chart alone and you learn three things for free: what the process is, what order its stages come in, and — from the words printed either side of each gap — exactly what kind of word each answer has to be. Only then do you go looking. Done the other way round, you read four paragraphs with no target in mind, copy a whole clause out of the text so the box reads naturally, and lose the mark to the word limit rather than to your English.

Read the chart, predict, then search

The procedure is short enough to run on every flow chart you ever meet.

1. Read every box in order, including the ones with no gaps. They tell you the stages, and the stage names are your search anchors.
2. Treat the limit as information, not a warning. ONE WORD ONLY means the target is a single strong noun or verb, so stop hunting phrases before you start.
3. For each gap, write the expected word class in the margin: noun, plural noun, adjective, number, past participle. The surrounding words decide this, not the topic.
4. Find the paragraph that handles that stage, read the sentence precisely, and lift the words that fit the class you predicted.
5. Read the completed box back. It must be grammatical, mean what the passage means, and sit inside the limit.

A worked chart

Here is a four-stage chart printed as the test prints it, with the instruction above it.

Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage
for each answer.

           Collections arrive from the field
                          |
                          v
      Sieving line separates chaff and 31 ...........
                          |
                          v
       Slow drying in circulating air, avoiding
                   32 ...........
                          |
                          v
         Foil packets held at 33 ........... degrees
                        Celsius
                          |
                          v
      Germination test every ten years; weak batches
            are 34 ........... and recollected

And the paragraph the answers come from:

Collections reaching the vault are processed in a fixed sequence. Each batch first passes along a sieving line, where chaff and insect debris are separated from the seed; anything organic left in the batch can harbour fungus in storage. The cleaned seed then spends up to a month in a chamber of slowly circulating dry air, which lowers its internal moisture without the heat damage an oven would cause. Only then is it sealed into laminated foil packets and moved to the cold store, which is maintained at minus eighteen degrees Celsius. Because even dormant seed ages, curators withdraw a few grams from each packet at ten-year intervals and run a germination test; any batch whose germination rate falls below 85 per cent is grown out in a nursery and recollected.

Now the part that decides the four marks: the class predicted from the chart alone, the passage words that supply it, the answer, and the longer answer candidates write instead.

Look at what the wrong column has in common. Every one of those over-length answers is a correct piece of comprehension. The candidate found the right sentence, understood it, and then copied enough of it to make the box read like English prose. Gap 33 is the cruellest version, because the longer answer repeats words the chart has already printed for you — a reliable signal that you have copied too far. Gap 34 is the plainer kind: the sentence simply runs on past the two words the box needs, and the candidate runs on with it.

Where this type hides

The same job appears under several labels: flow-chart completion, process completion, note completion laid out as a diagram, or a table that is the same task in a grid. Some versions give you a box of words to choose from instead of sending you into the passage, and then prediction pays twice over, because the list can be screened by word class before you read anything. Only the instruction line tells you which version you have, which is one more reason to read those lines properly.

Labelled diagrams of apparatus and cross-sections reward one extra move: before searching, say what each unlabelled part appears to do. The bit the water goes into, the lid, the layer under the roots. Passages describe function far more often than shape, so function is your search term — and a part you cannot describe at all is a part you will not find in the text.