The 5 Reading completion formats: note, table, summary, flow-chart, diagram label

Sentence, summary, note, table, flow-chart, and diagram-label completion all ask for the same underlying output — one or a few exact words copied from the passage into a gap — which makes them feel like the "easy" end of Reading. They're not automatically easy, because the strict word-limit rule ("no more than two words", "one word only", "no more than three words and/or a number") is graded with zero flexibility: a correct answer that runs one word over the limit scores exactly the same as a wrong answer, which is a purely avoidable loss that has nothing to do with comprehension. The real skill across all six formats is using the structure surrounding each gap — a table's column header, a flow-chart's step order, a diagram's spatial labels, a summary's paraphrased sentence — to predict the type of word you need before you go hunting for it in the passage, rather than reading the gap in isolation and scanning blindly.

Summary Completion is structurally the most demanding of the six because the paragraph containing the gaps restates the passage's content in different words rather than lifting sentences directly — so the material immediately around each gap is itself a paraphrase, and you have to locate the right area of the passage by matching meaning before you can find the exact word to lift. Take a summary sentence: "Researchers found that the insects' navigation relied primarily on ___ rather than on visual landmarks." If the passage's actual sentence reads "the study demonstrated that the beetles oriented themselves chiefly according to polarised light patterns, with visual cues playing only a minor role," you first have to recognise "oriented themselves chiefly according to" as the paraphrase of "relied primarily on," and only then can you lift the exact phrase "polarised light patterns" for the gap — scanning for the words "relied" or "primarily" directly in the passage would fail, since neither appears there.

Note Completion and Table Completion are close cousins that extract discrete facts (dates, quantities, named items) into a structured format rather than a flowing paragraph, and a table specifically gives you a second source of prediction beyond the surrounding words: its row and column headers. A table with columns labelled "Year", "Location", and "Attendance" tells you before you even read the surrounding sentence that a gap under "Attendance" wants a number, which narrows your scan through the passage considerably compared to a plain sentence gap that gives no such signal. Note Completion works the same way through its bullet-point structure and any sub-headings, so treat the layout itself as part of the question, not just decoration around it.

Flow-Chart Completion tracks a described process or sequence — a manufacturing procedure, an application process, a natural cycle — and its most useful feature is that the chart's own step order almost always mirrors the order information appears in the passage. If you're confident about steps 1, 2, and 4 but stuck on step 3, re-reading the passage text that sits between the sentences supporting steps 2 and 4 is far more efficient than re-scanning the whole passage from the top, because the answer to step 3 has to live in that specific span of text. Diagram Label Completion works on a similar locational logic but in space rather than sequence: it labels parts of an image (a piece of machinery, a building's cross-section, a geographical feature) using words from the passage, and the passage typically describes each part by its function or relative position ("located above the...", "attached to the...") rather than stating its label outright — so match the diagram's spatial relationships to the same spatial language in the text rather than searching for the label word itself.