Reading and Writing Fill in the Blanks: a method that saves time

A common way to lose marks here is to read up to the first gap, pick the word that sounds right from the drop-down list, and carry on. By the fourth gap you still do not know what the passage is about, and the clock is running ahead of you. This method fixes that by changing the order you work in, not by asking you to learn more words.

Read the whole passage before you touch a gap

Spend the first twenty to thirty seconds reading from start to finish without choosing anything. You are looking for the topic, the direction of the argument, and any point where the writer changes course.

Many gaps cannot be solved from their own sentence. A word that fits perfectly in sentence two can be wrong once you notice that sentence three begins with "However". Start choosing straight away and you risk making those mistakes with no way of seeing them.

Four checks for every gap

Test each gap in this order. Many gaps give way to the first two checks, and those quick wins pay for the slow ones.

1. Part of speech. What does the grammar demand? After "to" you need a base verb. Between "the" and a noun you usually need an adjective.
2. Form. Singular or plural, present or past, "-ing" or "-ed". Check that the verb agrees with its subject, and remember that "has", "have" and "had" are followed by a past participle.
3. Partners. Does the word keep company with its neighbours? We say "heavy rain", not "strong rain", and "make a decision", not "do a decision". Prepositions count here: "depend on", "responsible for".
4. Direction. Does the word fit what the passage is doing at that point: adding, contrasting, giving a reason, giving an example?

Cross out options as they fail. If two remain, read the sentence with each in turn and ask which one a careful writer would have chosen.

A worked example

This passage is my own, made up to show the checks. Try the four gaps before you read the reasoning.

• Gap 1: make. All four are base-form verbs, so grammar cannot help, but the partner can: we make a difference. "Take" belongs to other phrases, such as "take part".
• Gap 2: however. The sentence before reports doubt, and this one reports a fall in car journeys, so the writer is setting expectation against result. "Therefore" would claim that the doubt caused the fall. You only see this by reading past the gap.
• Gap 3: actual. The gap sits between "the" and the noun "pattern", so it needs an adjective, which removes "actually" and "action". "Active" is an adjective too, but the sentence is about what planners expected, so the real pattern is the "actual" one.
• Gap 4: extend. After "plans to" you need a base verb. "Extent" is a noun, "extensive" an adjective and "extended" a past form. This took five seconds, and those seconds belong to a harder gap.

Give each gap a time limit

Count the gaps as soon as the passage appears, then set an allowance of your own, because the clock may be shared across several tasks. The on-screen instructions say how time is counted. For example, with six minutes and six gaps, you would spend thirty seconds on the first read and have about fifty-five seconds a gap, with the easy ones taking far less.

When a gap has used about forty seconds, take the option you can defend best and go on. You can return to it before you click Next if time is left over.

One easy way to run out of time is to spend two minutes on the first two gaps. The last gaps then get a panicked glance, and the second half of the passage ends up half-read. Keep to your allowance so that the final gap gets the same care as the first.

Before test day, check what Pearson's current score guide says about an incorrect gap in this task, so you know whether a pure guess is worth making.

A ten-minute cloze routine

Any paragraph of 80 to 100 words from a newspaper or textbook will do.

1. Copy it into a document and replace eight words with blanks: two verbs, two nouns, an adjective, an adverb and two small words such as prepositions.
2. On a separate line, write the right answer for each blank and add three wrong options of your own, each wrong for a different reason: part of speech, form or partner.
3. Leave it until tomorrow, then solve it against the clock.
4. For every miss, write down which of the four checks would have caught it.

After a week you will see which check you skip. If the misses cluster around partners, the cure is vocabulary rather than grammar, and Reading Fill in the Blanks: collocations and word forms has a notebook method for it.

For your next step, do one blanks task in the practice tests on this site and notice which check you reach for first. This task counts towards both Reading and Writing, which one answer, several skills explains.