IELTS Reading: Choosing a Title: Practice & Tips

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Choosing a title for IELTS reading. This is another question type that appears in the IELTS Reading test which many people overlook because it isn’t a common one. However, it does appear and each answer you get write is a valuable point so it is worth preparing and training for this type of question.

Choosing a Title Tips

  • This is about choosing a title, not matching information
  • This reading exercise has only one question – to choose a title. However, normally this question would be given as the final question of the reading passage. This means you would already have answers over 10 questions on the passage before you come to this one.
  • The best title is the one that matching the whole aim of the passage.

IELTS Reading Choosing a Title Practice Lesson

Reading Passage:

Coffee is one of the most popular hot drinks in the world. Almost a third of the world’s population drinks coffee. People often meet at cafes or coffee shops for a coffee break during the middle of the morning or stop work in the afternoon to drink coffee.
About 7 million tons of coffee is produced every year. Brazil is, by far, the world’s largest coffee producer. About a third of the world’s production comes from this South American country. Other coffee producing countries include Vietnam, Indonesia and Colombia.
The United States is the biggest coffee consumer in the world. About 1.2 billion kilograms of coffee are consumed there every year. Drinking coffee is extremely popular in European countries, like Italy, France and Germany, as well as in Brazil.

Question: Which is the best title for the passage above?

Choose the correct letter A – C

A.  Coffee – a popular hot drink
B.  Coffee – the main consumers
C.  Coffee – the main producers

ANSWER

To see the answer, click below:

ANSWER

The correct answer is A

Explanation:

The opening paragraph and closing line both stress the same point which is about the popularity of coffee. While the first line alone or the last line alone might not themselves indicate aim, to have them both stressing the same point with so much detail in the first paragraph is something you can’t ignore.

There are no fixed rules about choosing a title. But you must remember that information for all options will be given in the passage. So, your aim is not to match information, but to decide what the whole aim of the passage is. You need to ask yourself – Why did this author write the passage? What was the aim of writing the passage? What was the key message that the author wanted to deliver?

So in this lesson, information about the producers and consumers was just extra information given in the passage for interest. But the main aim was to explain the popularity.

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Choosing a Title IELTS Reading: Practice & Tips

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Choosing a title for IELTS reading is quite a common question type. This is a practise lesson for choosing headings in IELTS. You will be given a list of possible titles for the whole passage you must choose the one that you think most appropriate.

IELTS READING CHOOSING A TITLE QUESTION

This reading question is usually the last question you might get in a reading passage. It would come after all the other questions. Why?

The answer is because this question requires you to have insight into the whole passage, not just locate answers in part of the passage. So, by giving this question as the last question, you will have had time already to look at the passage and know the contents of the passage. So, it is given last as a way to help you.

Choosing a Title: Reading Instructions

Here is an example of what that question would look like in your test:

IELTS Reading Choosing a Title Question

You will be given a list of possible titles for the passage. You need to select the best one.

IELTS Reading Choosing a Title Question – Techniques

Read this list of tips to that you approach this type of question with the right techniques.

  1. Never try this type of question first. 
    • You need a depth of understanding of the whole passage to get the answer right so tackle it last.
  2. Read though the possible titles and pay attention to similarities and differences.
  3. Look at specific words that stand out.
    • For example, is the title referring to a city or an entire continent. Look at each word individually. 
    • Don’t skim read the possible titles. Analyse them carefully.
  4. Nearly all possible titles will seem appropriate at first because they will all relate to aspects of the passage.
  5. This question is NOT about matching an answer option to part of the passage or specific information found in the passage.
  6. This is about choosing a title that reflects the aims of the whole passage.
  7. This doesn’t mean that the title matches the start, middle and end – but that it is about the aims of the whole passage.
  8. You need to think carefully about what the role of a paragraph is to the whole passage. 
  9. Always look at the introduction sentence and concluding sentence of paragraphs to see if there is a similar message or whether the aim of the paragraph is different to the opening line.
  10. Your answer must be a letter, not the words. If you write the words, your answer will be marked wrong.

Choosing a Title Reading Passage

Note: to make this more realistic to an IELTS reading given in your test, I’ve added some Matching Paragraph Information Questions to this lesson.

A   Babies learn to see over a period of time, much like they learn to walk and talk. They are not born with all the visual abilities they need in life. The ability to focus their eyes, move them accurately, and use them together as a team must be learned. Also, they need to learn how to use the visual information the eyes send to their brain in order to understand the world around them and interact with it appropriately.

B   From birth, babies begin exploring the wonders of the world with their eyes. Even before they learn to reach and grab with their hands or crawl and sit-up, their eyes are providing information and stimulation important for their development. Healthy eyes and good vision play a critical role in how infants learn to see. This is why it is important that parents take this into consideration when preparing a new born baby’s room. Providing interesting visual stimulus is crucial for a baby’s visual development. This can include the use of colours, mobile toys and images.

C   Babies as young as two to three months have shown that they have some form of depth perception. One method researchers have used to study babies and depth perception is through using a “visual cliff”. A visual cliff consists of a glass platform that is raised a few feet off the floor. One half of the cliff has a shallow side, where there is a checkerboard pattern directly underneath glass. The “deep end” of the cliff shows the pattern several feet below, creating the impression of a drop-off. Researchers found that infants as young as two months showed changed in heart rate when lowered face down over the shallow and deep ends of the visual cliff. Specifically, the infants’ heart rates decreased when they were lowered over the deep end, and were changed when over the shallow end.  Note that this experiment does not show that infants this young are afraid of the deep side. Usually, a decrease in heart rate indicates interest, while fear leads to an increase in heart rate. The experimental differences in heart rate indicate the infants could perceive a difference between the deep and shallow ends of the visual cliff.

Questions 1- 4

Which paragraph contains the following information. Choose the right letter from the paragraphs above (A-C). Letters might be used more than once.

  1. Babies should have a room containing a lot of interesting things to look at.
  2. Infants have different physical responses to downward visual distances.
  3. Having moving visual stimulus and a range of hues is good for a baby’s vision development.
  4. Babies are not born with the visual ability of an adult.

Question 5

Which is the best title for the reading passage above? Choose the best title from the options below (A-D).

  • A   The importance of vision in babies
  • B   The role of vision to human development
  • C   The development of perception in babies
  • D   Research into visual cliffs

VOCABULARY AND ANSWER

Click below:

Vocabulary
  • grab (vb) = clutch / grasp / seize
  • crawl = move on their hands and knees
  • depth perception = able to see downward
  • shallow = thin / not deep
  • pattern = design
  • infant = child / pre-school toddler
Answer
  1. B
  2. C
  3. B
  4. A
  5.  C

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