True, False, Not Given: the decision rule that ends the guessing

If you lose marks on True / False / Not Given, it is almost never because you cannot read the passage. It is because you cannot tell False from Not Given, and under time pressure you pick whichever one feels right. This article gives you a rule that removes the feeling, then makes you apply it six times.

What the three answers actually mean

The instructions on the paper are short, and every word matters:

• TRUE — the statement agrees with the information in the passage.
• FALSE — the statement contradicts the information in the passage.
• NOT GIVEN — there is no information on this in the passage.

Notice what FALSE requires. The passage has to say something that cannot be true at the same time as the statement. If the passage is silent on the point, the statement is not false, however unlikely it sounds. That is the whole trap: your general knowledge tells you a statement is wrong, but the passage never said so, and the answer is NOT GIVEN.

The three-step rule

Run these steps in order, and stop at the first one that gives an answer.

Step 1 — Find the place, not the claim. Use the nouns, names, numbers and dates in the statement to locate the sentence or two the statement is about. Do not search for the claim itself; the passage will paraphrase it. Statements come in passage order, so if you have already found statement 5 and statement 7, statement 6 sits between them.

Step 2 — Ask: does the passage say anything about this particular point? Not about the topic, about the exact thing the statement asserts. A statement about when something happened is not answered by a passage that only says that it happened. If the passage has nothing on the specific point, the answer is NOT GIVEN. You are finished; do not go looking for a contradiction.

Step 3 — Only now compare. The passage does say something about the point. Does it agree with the statement (TRUE) or is it incompatible with it (FALSE)? Watch the words that change the strength of a claim: all, only, always, never, first, most, the majority of, more than. A statement that says "most" is not confirmed by a passage that says "many".

The order matters. Candidates who go straight to step 3 find a sentence on the same topic, notice it does not match the statement exactly, and write FALSE. Step 2 forces you to check first whether the passage addresses the point at all.

Six statements to test the rule on

Here is a short original passage. Read it once, then work through the six statements before you open the explanations.

The Alderton Reservoir was completed in 1911 to supply water to the mills of the lower valley. Construction took four years and employed around six hundred labourers, most of whom were housed in a temporary village on the northern shore. The reservoir's capacity was increased in 1934 when the dam wall was raised by three metres, a project that displaced the last remaining farm on the valley floor. Today the reservoir no longer supplies industry; since 1988 its water has been treated for domestic use in the three nearest towns, and the temporary village has disappeared without trace.

1. The reservoir was built to provide drinking water.

2. More than five hundred people worked on the construction.

3. The workers' village was on the southern shore of the reservoir.

4. Raising the dam wall in 1934 was opposed by local farmers.

5. The reservoir stopped supplying the mills before 1988.

6. The three nearest towns had no water supply before 1988.

Explanations

1. FALSE. Step 1 takes you to the first sentence. Step 2: the passage does say why it was built, "to supply water to the mills". Step 3: mills are industry, not drinking water, and the passage later confirms domestic use only began in 1988. The statement contradicts the passage.

2. TRUE. Step 1: "six hundred labourers". Step 2: the passage gives a number. Step 3: "around six hundred" is more than five hundred, so the statement agrees. Note that "around" would make a statement of exactly six hundred NOT GIVEN; "more than five hundred" is safe because the approximation stays well above it.

3. FALSE. The passage says "northern shore". The statement says southern. That is a direct contradiction, so FALSE, not NOT GIVEN. This is the one candidates most often get right for the wrong reason: they mark it FALSE because it "sounds wrong", and the same instinct then misfires on statement 4.

4. NOT GIVEN. Step 1 takes you to the 1934 sentence. Step 2: the passage says the project displaced a farm. It says nothing about whether anyone opposed it. Displacement and opposition are different points. Your instinct says a displaced farmer would object, and that instinct is exactly what the question is testing. The passage is silent, so NOT GIVEN.

5. NOT GIVEN. The passage says the reservoir "no longer supplies industry" and that domestic treatment began in 1988. It does not say when the industrial supply ended: it could have been 1950 or 1988. The statement is about timing, and the passage gives no timing for that event. Many candidates write TRUE here because the two sentences sit next to each other; adjacency is not information.

6. NOT GIVEN. The passage says the towns have received the reservoir's water since 1988. It says nothing about what they had before. A statement about the absence of something is almost always NOT GIVEN unless the passage explicitly states the absence.

If you got 4, 5 and 6 right, you have the rule. If you wrote FALSE for any of them, re-read step 2: in all three cases the passage never addressed the specific point, so there was nothing to contradict.

The four traps, named

Once you know them you will see them on every paper.

1. The plausible inference. The statement is something a reasonable person would conclude from the passage (statement 4). The passage did not say it. NOT GIVEN.
2. The neighbouring fact. The passage gives a fact about the same subject but a different attribute: a date instead of a reason, a place instead of a size (statement 5). NOT GIVEN.
3. The quantifier shift. The passage says "many", "some", "often"; the statement says "most", "all", "always". This is usually FALSE when the passage gives a clear count and NOT GIVEN when it does not, so check which you have.
4. The outside fact. The statement is true in the real world but the passage never mentions it. The test is about the passage. NOT GIVEN.

How to practise it

Do not practise by doing whole passages and counting your score. Practise the rule: take any set of True / False / Not Given questions, and for each statement write down which step gave you the answer before you write the answer itself. After twenty statements the step becomes automatic, and only then is timed practice worth doing. On the real paper you have roughly twenty minutes per passage — how the 60 minutes divide across the three passages is its own decision — which leaves about a minute and a half for each statement of this type once the passage is read. There is a free Academic passage with real exam question types to run the rule on.