True/False/Not Given: telling "False" apart from "Not Given"
8 min
A True/False/Not Given statement is almost never copied word-for-word from the passage — it is a paraphrase, and your first job is to find the sentence it paraphrases. Once you find it, ask a single question: does that sentence make a claim about the same thing the statement claims, and does it agree or disagree? If the passage makes a claim on the same point and the statement matches it, that is True. If the passage makes a claim on the same point and the statement contradicts it, that is False. If the passage never makes any claim on that specific point at all — even if the general topic is discussed — that is Not Given. Not Given is not "weakly supported" or "probably true"; it means the information simply is not there to check.
Worked example
Passage sentence: "The bridge, completed in 1937, was designed to withstand winds of up to 100 miles per hour, though engineers at the time had no way to test this claim under real conditions." Statement A: "The bridge's wind resistance was never verified before it opened." Statement B: "The bridge was the tallest structure in the region when it was built."
Statement A paraphrases "had no way to test this claim under real conditions" almost exactly — same point, same claim. That is True. Statement B introduces a new attribute (height, tallest structure) that the sentence never addresses at all; the passage tells you about wind resistance and testing, nothing about height. There is no claim to agree or disagree with, so this is Not Given — not False, even though it sounds like the kind of fact this passage might contain.
Two habits keep you fast and accurate. First, locate before you judge: find the exact sentence, and if you cannot find one on that specific point after a careful scan, stop looking — that absence is your answer, Not Given. Second, watch for scope words that quietly turn a True statement False: "all", "only", "always", "never", "the first", "the main reason". A passage can support a moderate claim ("contributed to the decline") while the statement oversells it ("was the main reason for the decline") — that mismatch in scope, not the topic, is what makes it False.