IELTS Reading Flow-Chart Completion: How to Follow the Steps and Fill Every Gap

Flow-chart completion is one of the less common IELTS Reading question types, which is exactly why it catches people out. You are shown a diagram — a series of boxes linked by arrows — that summarises a process or sequence from the passage, and some of the boxes have gaps you must fill with words taken from the text. It looks intimidating, but the underlying skill is simple: read a process carefully and match each stage to the passage. This guide shows you how the arrows work for you, where the answers actually hide, and the specific traps that turn easy marks into zeros.

What the question type asks

You are given an instruction such as "Complete the flow-chart below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer." The chart lays out the stages of a process — how a material is manufactured, how a natural cycle works, how a study was carried out — with arrows showing the direction of flow. Three rules define the type:

• Answers are copied from the passage. Like sentence and short-answer completion, you take the exact words from the text. You do not paraphrase or supply a synonym of your own.
• The word limit is absolute. "No more than two words" means a three-word answer scores zero, even when the correct words are inside it. A hyphenated word such as "cold-pressed" counts as one word; a number written as a figure counts within an "and/or a number" allowance.
• The arrows carry meaning. Each arrow signals "and then" — the next stage in the sequence. The chart is a compressed version of the process the passage describes, so the logic of the diagram must match the logic of the text.

Why order works differently here

Most IELTS Reading tasks give you answers in passage order, so you can move steadily down the text. Flow-chart completion often does not, and that is the single biggest cause of lost marks. A process is frequently described in one dense paragraph, or even one long sentence, so several of your answers can sit close together — or appear in an order that does not match the boxes top to bottom. The fix is to stop scanning for answers in sequence and instead locate each gap by the stage it describes. Read the box before the gap and the box after it: those tell you exactly which part of the process you are in, and that is what you search the passage for.

The five-step method

1. Read the instruction and lock the word limit in your head. Say it to yourself — "two words max." This one habit protects more marks than any clever reading technique.
2. Read the whole chart first, gaps and all. Understand the process as a story before you fill anything. Knowing where the sequence is heading tells you what kind of word each gap needs — a material, an action, a result.
3. Find where the process is described in the passage. Use a distinctive term from the chart — a technical noun, a proper name, a number — to locate the relevant paragraph. Processes are usually described in one place, so once you find it, most of your answers are nearby.
4. Match each gap to its stage, not to its position. For each box, decide what part of the process it represents, then find that stage in the text. The words either side of the gap tell you the grammatical shape of the answer — a noun after "the", a verb after "is then".
5. Copy exactly, then read the completed box back. The filled box must make sense as a step and fit the arrows before and after it. If it reads awkwardly, you have the wrong words or too many of them.

A worked example

Passage extract: "The harvested beans are first spread out to dry in the sun for up to two weeks. Once dried, they are roasted at high temperature, which develops their flavour, before being ground into a fine powder ready for packing."

Flow-chart boxes: Beans harvested → dried in the [1] ______ → [2] ______ at high temperature → ground into powder → packed. (NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS)

Box 1 follows "dried in the", so a noun for a place is coming; the passage says "dry in the sun" — answer: sun. Box 2 sits between drying and grinding and pairs with "at high temperature"; the passage says "they are roasted at high temperature" — answer: roasted. Notice the trap: "up to two weeks" is a tempting phrase that fits the drying stage, but no box asks for it, and copying it into box 1 breaks the two-word limit and answers the wrong question. Let the box, not the nearest phrase, decide what you copy.

The traps, named

• The word-limit trap. The passage gives a rich phrase — "roasted at high temperature" — and the limit is two words. Copy only the words the gap needs, nothing more.
• The position trap. Assuming box 3's answer comes after box 2's in the passage. In a single-paragraph process the order can shift — locate by stage, not by line.
• The grammar-fix trap. Changing a word's form so it "fits" the box. You must copy exactly; if the exact word does not fit, you have the wrong word.
• The paraphrase-blindness trap. The chart may say "heated" while the passage says "roasted". Match by meaning within the process, not by identical wording.
• The spelling giveaway. You are copying from a visible text, so a misspelled answer is an unforced zero. Copy unfamiliar terms letter by letter.

How this differs from its neighbours

Flow-chart completion belongs to the copy-from-the-text family, so the word-limit discipline is the same one you use for summary, note and table completion. The difference is that a flow-chart is built around sequence: the arrows impose an order, and your job is to slot each stage into the right place. That makes the surrounding boxes your most powerful clue — they tell you what came before and what comes next, which narrows the search far more tightly than a keyword alone. Treat the chart as a map of the process and every gap becomes a specific, answerable question.

Practising it properly

Because flow-chart completion appears less often, most candidates under-practise it — turn that into an advantage. Drill it inside full passages on the Reading practice pages, doing your first few untimed with the method above: read the whole chart, find the process, then fill each gap by its stage. Review every miss by naming its trap from the list — misses you can name stop repeating. Then fold the type back into timed practice, budgeting roughly a minute per question across the 40 questions in 60 minutes, and remember Reading has no extra transfer time: your answers must be on the sheet when the hour ends. When you have a raw score out of 40, the band score calculator converts it to a band so you can see the recovered marks add up. Flow-chart completion rewards careful process-reading over speed — which is why, with a little practice, it becomes one of the most reliable types in the paper.