There are a total of 14 different types of questions in the IELTS reading section. Thus, it is essential to prepare and strategize well for each type. One of the most common and frequently asked questions is the IELTS reading table completion kind. These types of questions may look challenging. However, with proper practice, tips, and strategies you can get a great score. Read the blog to effectively understand all about the table completion tasks and achieve 8+ bands. So let’s begin!
Table of Contents
The table completion questions appear in both IELTS Academic and IELTS General reading tests. In this type, you will be required to complete the table with some key points or words from the reading passage. Table completion is similar to flow chart and notes completion type of questions.
The table completion IELTS reading questions evaluate candidates’ ability to understand detailed information and main ideas in the text. Moreover, these types of tasks assess your scanning and paraphrasing skills. However, you must answer within the word limit if mentioned, ‘ONE WORD ONLY or NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS.’ Not following the instructions provided in the question may result in lower scores.
The IELTS reading table completion has several types that may appear in the exam. These may be factual, categorization, comparison, or sequential table completion. Thus, before solving the task you must first understand the type.
1. Factual Table Completion
In this type of task, a table presents facts or data extracted from the passage. Further, you must locate specific numbers, dates, or names in the text. For instance, a table summarizing research findings, statistics, or historical events. There will be some gaps that you must fill in.
2. Categorization Table Completion
The IELTS reading table completion question has another type which is categorization table completion. Wherein the table is divided into categories or classifications based on the passage. You must match the correct details to each category.
3. Comparison Table Completion
In this type, the table presents a comparison between two or more items. Students need to fill in the blanks with the information from the text. For example, there is a comparison between two tests. There will be some gaps that you must fill in.
4. Sequential Table Completion
The table completion IELTS reading questions have another type called sequential table completion. A table along with some information in a sequence or chronological order will be provided. You need to fill in the missing steps or dates.
These were the types of table completion questions. For better understanding, you must practice sample questions.
This section covers IELTS reading table completion samples for your reference.
Here is an IELTS reading question sample for your reference. Practising with this type of sample can help you achieve 8+ bands on the IELTS exam.
IELTS Reading Passage- A Remarkable Beetle
More than 4,000 species of these remarkable creatures have evolved and adapted to the world’s different climates and the dung of its many animals. Australia’s native dung beetles are scrub and woodland dwellers, specialising in coarse marsupial droppings and avoiding the soft cattle dung in which bush flies and buffalo flies breed. Some of the most remarkable beetles are the dung beetles, which spend almost their whole lives eating and breeding in dung.
In the early 1960s George Bornemissza, then a scientist at the Australian Government’s premier research organisation, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), suggested that dung beetles should be introduced to Australia to control dung-breeding flies. Between 1968 and 1982, the CSIRO imported insects from about 50 different species of dung beetle, from Asia, Europe and Africa, aiming to match them to different climatic zones in Australia. Of the 26 species that are known to have become successfully integrated into the local environment, only one, an African species released in northern Australia, has reached its natural boundary.
Introducing dung beetles into a pasture is a simple process: approximately 1,500 beetles are released, a handful at a time, into fresh cow pats2 in the cow pasture.
The beetles immediately disappear beneath the pats digging and tunnelling and, if they successfully adapt to their new environment, soon become a permanent, self-sustaining part of the local ecology. In time they multiply and within three or four years the benefits to the pasture are obvious.
Dung beetles work from the inside of the pat so they are sheltered from predators such as birds and foxes. Most species burrow into the soil and bury dung in tunnels directly underneath the pats, which are hollowed out from within. Some large species originating from France excavate tunnels to a depth of approximately 30 cm below the dung pat. These beetles make sausage-shaped brood chambers along the tunnels. The shallowest tunnels belong to a much smaller Spanish species that buries dung in chambers that hang like fruit from the branches of a pear tree. South African beetles dig narrow tunnels of approximately 20 cm below the surface of the pat. Some surface-dwelling beetles, including a South African species, cut perfectly shaped balls from the pat, which are rolled away and attached to the bases of plants.
For maximum dung burial in spring, summer and autumn, farmers require a variety of species with overlapping periods of activity. In the cooler environments of the state of Victoria, the large French species (2.5 cms long) is matched with smaller (half this size), temperate-climate Spanish species. The former are slow to recover from the winter cold and produce only one or two generations of offspring from late spring until autumn. The latter, which multiply rapidly in early spring, produce two to five generations annually. The South African ball-rolling species, being a subtropical beetle, prefers the climate of northern and coastal New South Wales where it commonly works with the South African tunnelling species. In warmer climates, many species are active for longer periods of the year.
Dung beetles were initially introduced in the late 1960s with a view to controlling buffalo flies by removing the dung within a day or two and so preventing flies from breeding. However, other benefits have become evident. Once the beetle larvae have finished pupation, the residue is a first-rate source of fertiliser. The tunnels abandoned by the beetles provide excellent aeration and water channels for root systems. In addition, when the new generation of beetles has left the nest the abandoned burrows are an attractive habitat for soil-enriching earthworms. The digested dung in these burrows is an excellent food supply for the earthworms, which decompose it further to provide essential soil nutrients. If it were not for the dung beetle, chemical fertiliser and dung would be washed by rain into streams and rivers before it could be absorbed into the hard earth, polluting water courses and causing blooms of blue-green algae. Without the beetles to dispose of the dung, cow pats would litter pastures making grass inedible to cattle and depriving the soil of sunlight. Australia’s 30 million cattle each produce 10-12 cowpats a day. This amounts to 1.7 billion tonnes a year, enough to smother about 110,000 sq km of pasture, half the area of Victoria.
Dung beetles have become an integral part of the successful management of dairy farms in Australia over the past few decades. A number of species are available from the CSIRO or through a small number of private breeders, most of whom were entomologists with the CSIRO’s dung beetle unit who have taken their specialised knowledge of the insect and opened small businesses in direct competition with their former employer.
Questions for Reading Passage: A Remarkable Beetle
Questions 1-5
1. We need to find out the preferred climate of Spanish beetles.
2. We need to find out when is the start of the active period (time to reproduce) of Spanish beetles.
3. We need to find out how many generations the Spanish beetles produce annually or in a year.
4. We need to figure out the preferred climate of South African ball roller beetles.
5. Which is the last question in this reading passage, we need to figure out the name of the complementary species for South African ball roller beetles, i.e. which beetle species work with South African ball roller beetles.
Here are the answers along with their explanation for the above-mentioned table completion task.
Answer 1: Temperate
Explanation: As per the 2nd line of Paragraph 5: It is clearly mentioned that the Spanish species are smaller in size so they prefer temperate environments. So, the answer would be “Temperate”.
Answer 2: Early spring
Explanation: As per the 4th line of Paragraph 5, it is clearly mentioned that the Spanish species grow several births in the early morning. So the answer is “Early Morning”.
Answer 3: Two to Five
Explanation: As per the 4th line of Paragraph 5, it is clearly mentioned that the Spanish species produce two to five generations annually in the early morning. So the answer is “two to five”.
Answer 4: Subtropical
Explanation: To figure out this question's answer in the reading passage read the 5th line of paragraph 6 shows that South African species prefer a subtropical beetle. So, the answer would be “Subtropical”.
Answer 5: (South African) tunnelling/tunnelling (species)
Explanation: To figure out this question answer in the reading passage read the 5th line of paragraph 6 mentions that the South African boll rolling species commonly works with “South African tunneling species” and that is the answer.
Here is another IELTS reading question sample for table completion questions that will help you get a higher IELTS band score in the reading section.
IELTS Passage: The Benefits of Being Bilingual
Paragraph A: According to the latest figures, the majority of the world’s population is now bilingual or multilingual, having grown up speaking two or more languages. In the past, such children were considered to be at a disadvantage compared with their monolingual peers. Over the past few decades, however, technological advances have allowed researchers to look more deeply at how bilingualism interacts with and changes the cognitive and neurological systems, thereby identifying several clear benefits of being bilingual.
Paragraph B: Research shows that when a bilingual person uses one language, the other is active at the same time. When we hear a word, we don’t hear the entire word all at once: the sounds arrive in sequential order. Long before the word is finished, the brain’s language system begins to guess what that word might be. If you hear ‘can’, you will likely activate words like ‘candy’ and ‘candle’ as well, at least during the earlier stages of word recognition. For bilingual people, this activation is not limited to a single language; auditory input activates corresponding words regardless of the language to which they belong. Some of the most compelling evidence for this phenomenon, called ‘language co-activation’, comes from studying eye movements. A Russian-English bilingual asked to ‘pick up a marker’ from a set of objects would look more at a stamp than someone who doesn’t know Russian, because the Russian word for ‘stamp’, marka, sounds like the English word he or she heard, ‘marker’. In cases like this, language co-activation occurs because what the listener hears could map onto words in either language.
Paragraph C: Having to deal with this persistent linguistic competition can result in difficulties, however. For instance, knowing more than one language can cause speakers to name pictures more slowly, and can increase ‘tip-of-the-tongue states’, when you can almost, but not quite, bring a word to mind. As a result, the constant juggling of two languages creates a need to control how much a person accesses a language at any given time. For this reason, bilingual people often perform better on tasks that require conflict management. In the classic Stroop Task, people see a word and are asked to name the colour of the word’s font. When the colour and the word match (i., the word ‘red’ printed in red), people correctly name the colour more quickly than when the colour and the word don’t match (i., the word ‘red’ printed in blue). This occurs because the word itself (‘red’) and its font colour (blue) conflict. Bilingual people often excel at tasks such as this, which tap into the ability to ignore competing perceptual information and focus on the relevant aspects of the input. Bilinguals are also better at switching between two tasks; for example, when bilinguals have to switch from categorizing objects by colour (red or green) to categorizing them by shape (circle or triangle), they do so more quickly than monolingual people, reflecting better cognitive control when having to make rapid changes of strategy.
Paragraph D: It also seems that the neurological roots of the bilingual advantage extend to brain areas more traditionally associated with sensory processing. When monolingual and bilingual adolescents listen to simple speech sounds without any intervening background noise, they show highly similar brain stem responses. When researchers play the same sound to both groups in the presence of background noise, however, the bilingual listeners’ neural response is considerably larger, reflecting better encoding of the sound’s fundamental frequency, a feature of sound closely related to pitch perception.
Paragraph E: Such improvements in cognitive and sensory processing may help a bilingual person to process information in the environment, and help explain why bilingual adults acquire a third language better than monolingual adults master a second language. This advantage may be rooted in the skill of focusing on information about the new language while reducing interference from the languages they already know.
Paragraph F: Research also indicates that bilingual experience may help to keep the cognitive mechanisms sharp by recruiting alternate brain networks to compensate for those that become damaged during ageing. Older bilinguals enjoy improved memory relative to monolingual people, which can lead to real-world health benefits. In a study of over 200 patients with Alzheimer’s disease, a degenerative brain disease, bilingual patients reported showing initial symptoms of the disease an average of five years later than monolingual patients. In a follow-up study, researchers compared the brains of bilingual and monolingual patients matched on the severity of Alzheimer’s symptoms. Surprisingly, the bilinguals’ brains had more physical signs of disease than their monolingual counterparts, even though their outward behavior and abilities were the same. If the brain is an engine, bilingualism may help it to go farther on the same amount of fuel.
Paragraph G: Furthermore, the benefits associated with bilingual experience seem to start very early. In one study, researchers taught seven-month-old babies growing up in monolingual or bilingual homes that when they heard a tinkling sound, a puppet appeared on one side of a screen. Halfway through the study, the puppet began appearing on the opposite side of the screen. In order to get a reward, the infants had to adjust the rule they’d learned; only the bilingual babies were able to successfully learn the new rule. This suggests that for very young children, as well as for older people, navigating a multilingual environment imparts advantages that transfer far beyond language.
Question of Reading Passage: The Benefits of Being Bilingual
Question 1-5
Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
| Test | Findings |
| Observing the ___1___ of Russian-English bilingual people when asked to select certain objects | Bilingual people engage both languages simultaneously: a mechanism known as ___2___ |
| A test called the ____3___ focusing on naming colours | Bilingual people are more able to handle tasks involving a skill called ____4____ |
| A test involving switching between tasks | When changing strategies, bilingual people have superior ____5____ |
Here are the answers along with their explanation for the above-mentioned IELTS reading table completion questions for the above passage.
Answer 1: eye movements
Explanation: The 6th sentence of the B paragraph shows that Russia portrays a definitive approach towards eye movement. Hence, the answer is "Eye Movement".
Answer 2: language co-activation
Explanation: The 6th sentence of the B paragraph clarifies that language co-activation plays a vital role in studying both verbal means and means of communication. Hence, the answer is "Language Co-activation".
Answer 3: Stroop Task
Explanation: The 5th sentence of the C paragraph states that Stroop's task is an act towards naming colours by observing a word's font. Hence, the answer is "Stroop Task".
Answer 4: conflict management
Explanation: The 4th sentence of the C paragraph states that bilingual are more able to handle those tasks that involve special skills and conflict management. Hence, the answer is “Conflict Management”.
Answer 5: cognitive control
Explanation: The last sentence of the C paragraph states that bilingual people portray better cognitive control when compared to monolingual ones. Hence, the answer is "Cognitive Control".
You can check out a few more examples of the IELTS reading practice test for reference.
It is vital to strategies well before appearing for the IELTS exam. Thus, here are a few tips and strategies that will help you achieve 8+ bands.
To score well, theIELTS reading table completion questions are important. However, it is also essential to make proper strategies to deal with different question types. Thus, here are a few tips and strategies that you can incorporate to score higher.
To wrap up, the blog covered everything about IELTS reading table completion questions. Besides, there are sample passages and a few other examples for your reference as well. Additionally, a few tips and strategies to achieve a great score on the exam are also provided in the write-up. Consistent practice and utilizing the strategies will help you get familiar with all the question types. For this, you may seek professional help from Gradding.com, our experts provide excellent coaching in this domain.
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