Gap-filling questions
Another common vehicle is gap-filling or cloze questions, which are typically constructed by deleting words from selected texts and ‘simply’ requiring the test-taker to restore the word that has been deleted. Gap-filling questions can be both subjective with open-ended items and objective with selective alternatives. In some scoring procedures, credit may also be given for providing a word that makes sense in the gap, even if it is not the word which was originally deleted, which makes the technique of gap-filling subjective. If certain options are already provided or relevant information can be found directly in the text, then the technique is objective. In the IELTS reading test, all gap-filling tasks are objective ones. The following are two examples: