Read and Complete

A short passage with several words cut in half, and three minutes to restore all of them. Unlike Fill in the Blanks, you have context in every direction — which is exactly why the passage should be read before a single letter is typed.

The Facts


Time	3 minutes per passage
Preparation time	None
How many per test	3-6 passages
Subscore	Reading
Adaptive	Yes
Scored as	Right or wrong, per word

What You See

A paragraph of five or six sentences with several damaged words in it. Each damaged word shows its opening letters and empty boxes for the rest. Every word is scored on its own, so a passage is worth as many points as it has blanks.

The title and the first and last sentences are never damaged.
Damaged words are never next to each other.
Proper nouns and acronyms are never damaged.
The passage can be fiction, a news story or textbook prose.

Those four rules are published by Duolingo, and together they mean the passage always hands you a clean frame: a title, an opening and a closing sentence you can trust completely.

The Method That Works

Read the whole passage first, at speed, ignoring the blanks. Thirty seconds spent here pays for itself twice over. The title and the undamaged opening give you the topic.
Do the easy words first. Every word you restore narrows the meaning of the ones left, and the timer does not care in which order you fill them.
For each remaining blank, classify then count. Part of speech from the grammar, length from the boxes.
Reread the finished passage in the last twenty seconds. A word that made sense in isolation but breaks the paragraph is the commonest late error.

A worked passage

Coins have been used as a form of currency for thousands of years, dating back to anc____ civilizations like the Greeks, Romans, and Chinese. They were initially made from valu____ metals such as gold, silver, and bronze, and were used as a medium of exchange for goods and serv____.
anc____ — before civilizations, so an adjective; the Greeks and Romans fix the meaning. ancient.
valu____ — before metals, so an adjective; gold and silver fix the meaning. valuable.
serv____ — after goods and, a fixed pair. services.

Common Mistakes

Working left to right and getting stuck on the second blank with two minutes and forty seconds still on the clock.
Typing a plausible word that does not fit the box count.
Ignoring the last sentence. It is undamaged, and it usually resolves whatever the paragraph was building towards.
Leaving a blank empty. There is no penalty for a wrong guess and a guaranteed zero for an empty box.
Missing the plural or the tense. evol___ in a sentence about the past is evolved, not evolve.

How to Practise

Do full passages under the real three-minute clock, never blank by blank.
After each passage, note whether you lost points to vocabulary, to spelling or to the clock. The three need different fixes.
Read one non-fiction article a day. Read and Complete rewards exposure to the ordinary academic register more than any other item on the test.
Two full passages with answer keys are on the Reading samples page.

Kirill O'Nayd, Duolingo English Test expert

Written by Kirill O'Nayd

English test expert and educator at TestSucceed, where he builds the Duolingo English Test practice tasks and mock tests and has spent years taking apart how computer-adaptive, AI-graded exams award their points. See all TestSucceed preparation materials.