Welcome, language learners and future IELTS high-scorers! One of the most stealthy skills for conquering the IELTS Reading test is being a Grammar Detective. You don’t always need to know the exact word, but if you can identify the Part of Speech missing in a gap, you can often find the answer by elimination and logic.
This exercise is designed to sharpen that instinct. Let’s quickly review our four key suspects before we begin the investigation.
📘 The Suspects: A Quick Briefing
- The Noun (N): The person, place, thing, or idea. It’s often the subject or object of a sentence.
- Example: The analysis revealed a significant correlation.
- Clue: Look for articles (a, an, the) or adjectives before the gap.
- The Verb (V): The action or state of being. It tells you what is happening.
- Example: Recent studies substantiate the theory. The climate is fluctuating.
- Clue: Often follows a subject (noun) or an auxiliary verb (is, has, could, will).
- The Adjective (Adj): The describer. It modifies (tells us more about) a noun.
- Example: The empirical data was compelling. A contentious debate followed.
- Clue: It usually comes right before a noun, or after linking verbs like ‘is’, ‘seems’, ‘becomes’.
- The Adverb (Adv): The modifier of modifiers. It describes a verb, an adjective, or another adverb, often telling how, when, or where.
- Example: The results sharply contradicted the hypothesis. It was a particularly ubiquitous phenomenon.
- Clue: Often ends in -ly (e.g., significantly, rapidly). It adds detail to the action or description.
Remember: In the IELTS Reading fill-in-the-blank tasks, the word you need will always be in the text. Your job is to know what form of the word (noun, verb, etc.) will grammatically fit the gap.
🕵️♀️ The Investigation: Identify the Missing Part of Speech
Instructions: Read each sentence carefully. A word has been removed from the gap (_____). Your task is to deduce and write whether the missing word should be a Noun (N), Verb (V), Adjective (Adj), or Adverb (Adv) in the blank provided. The sentences are structured like those in the Academic IELTS Reading test.
