IELTS Reading matching headings: the two-step method, worked on a full passage

Matching headings is the question type candidates most often leave half-finished. It sits first on the page, it covers the whole passage, and it looks like it needs the whole passage read before a single answer can be written. It does not. It needs one specific thing from each paragraph, and once you know what that thing is, the headings almost match themselves.

What a heading is, and what it is not

A heading is the main idea of a paragraph: the one thing the paragraph exists to say. It is not the most interesting sentence, not the sentence with the numbers in it, and not the topic in general. Two paragraphs can be about street trees and have completely different headings, because one is about their history and the other about their cost.

The question writers know that candidates match words, so every list of headings contains distractors built the same three ways:

1. A detail promoted to a heading. The heading is true of one sentence in the paragraph, not of the paragraph. This is the trap that catches the most people.
2. A topic word without the idea. The heading repeats a noun that appears several times in the paragraph, attached to a claim the paragraph does not make.
3. A heading for a paragraph that is not there. The list always has more headings than paragraphs. One or two match nothing.

The two-step method

Step 1: summarise before you match. For each paragraph, read the first sentence, the last sentence, and any sentence that begins with a turn (however, but, yet, instead, in practice). Write a three- or four-word summary in the margin, in your own words, before you look at the headings. If you look at the headings first, you will find their words in the paragraph and stop thinking.

Step 2: match summaries to headings, easiest first. Go down your summaries and pick the paragraphs whose heading is obvious. Cross those headings out. What remains is a smaller list against the harder paragraphs, and the distractors now stand out because nothing in your summaries mentions them.

Do this with a pencil in under a minute per paragraph, and the question type stops being the time sink it is notorious for.

The passage

Five paragraphs, seven headings. Read the headings after the passage, not before, and try the method: margin summaries first.

A. The idea of lining a city street with trees is younger than most cities. Until the nineteenth century, trees inside a town were found in private gardens and on the grounds of churches, not along public roads, which were narrow and used for trade. The tree-lined avenue arrived with the wide boulevards cut through Paris in the 1850s, and was copied within decades by planners in Berlin, Buenos Aires and Washington, who saw it as the mark of a modern capital.

B. The benefit that residents notice first is shade, and it is larger than it feels. A mature tree canopy can lower the surface temperature of a pavement by more than ten degrees on a summer afternoon, and the air beneath it by two or three. Because the effect comes from water evaporating through the leaves as much as from blocked sunlight, a street of trees cools the air that moves through it, not only the ground directly below. On the hottest days this is the difference between a street people use and one they avoid.

C. None of this comes free, and the cost is not mainly the planting. A tree pays its way for decades, but its roots follow water, and in a city the nearest water is usually beneath the pavement, in the cracks around pipes and cable ducts. Lifted paving slabs, blocked drains and cracked kerbs are the ordinary consequences of a healthy tree in a space designed without it. Most complaints to city councils about street trees are not about the trees at all, but about what their roots have done to the surface a few metres away.

D. Which trees survive is a question of fit, not of beauty. The species that flourish in a park, with open soil and room to spread, often fail on a street, where the soil is compacted, the water is intermittent and the air carries salt in winter. Cities that planted a single favoured species discovered the second problem: one disease can take an entire avenue in a few years, which is how many European cities lost their elms. The streets that have kept their canopy are the ones planted with a mixture of tough, unglamorous species chosen for the conditions.

E. The newest change is in who does the planting. In a growing number of cities the council supplies the tree and the pit, and residents of the street apply for it, choose from an approved list, and take on the watering for the first two summers, which is when most newly planted street trees die. Survival rates under these schemes are markedly higher than under council-only planting, for a reason that has little to do with horticulture: a tree that a household asked for is a tree that someone is watching.

Headings

i. The financial cost of planting a tree ii. How trees lower the temperature of a street iii. Where the tree-lined street came from iv. Choosing trees that can survive the conditions v. Residents take on the planting vi. Why tree roots and pavements come into conflict vii. A fall in the number of birds in cities

The answers, with the trap in each

A: iii. Margin summary: history of street trees. The first sentence gives the idea ("younger than most cities") and the last confirms it with dates and places. No heading in the list is a distractor for this paragraph, which is why it should be matched first: an easy paragraph removes a heading from the list.

B: ii. Margin summary: shade cools streets, more than expected. The numbers in the middle are the detail; the heading is the idea they support. Note that the heading says "lower the temperature" while the paragraph says "shade", "cooler", "lower the surface temperature": a paraphrase, as the correct heading almost always is.

C: vi. Margin summary: roots damage pavements, cause complaints. This is where heading i waits. The paragraph opens with "None of this comes free, and the cost", and a candidate matching words picks financial cost at once. But the very same sentence says the cost "is not mainly the planting", and the rest of the paragraph is about roots, slabs, drains and complaints. Heading i is a detail promoted to a heading, built from one word in the first sentence. Heading vi is what the paragraph is for.

D: iv. Margin summary: which species survive; monoculture risk. The elms are the memorable sentence and they are a detail; the heading is the fit between species and conditions, stated in the first sentence and again in the last. A second trap is quieter: heading iv says "survive the conditions", the paragraph says "flourish", "fail", "kept their canopy". Different words, same idea.

E: v. Margin summary: residents plant and water, better survival. The first sentence announces the idea ("who does the planting"); the survival statistic is the supporting detail. Heading v is the plain paraphrase.

Headings i and vii match nothing. Heading i was the detail-trap for C. Heading vii is the third distractor type: birds are never mentioned. It exists so that a candidate who runs out of time and guesses has one more way to be wrong.

Order of work on the real paper

Matching headings is printed before the other questions on the same passage, but nothing says you must answer it first. If the passage also carries True / False / Not Given or matching information questions, those send you to specific paragraphs and leave you knowing what each one is about; the headings then take a minute. Many strong candidates do the headings last for exactly this reason. What you should not do is read the whole passage slowly once "for the headings" and then again for everything else. One careful pass, margin summaries as you go, and the headings are a by-product of it. Then try the method on a free Academic passage with real exam question types.