Fill in the Blanks
One sentence, one damaged word, twenty seconds. Read & Complete compressed to a single decision, with none of the surrounding context to lean on.
- 20 sec on the clock, 6–9 per full test
- Feeds your Reading and Writing subscores
- Built for the current July 2025 DET format, including the new Interactive Speaking task
Fill in the Blanks gives you one sentence with a word missing its back half, and twenty seconds to restore it. Mechanically it is Read & Complete shrunk to a single item.
Strategically it is a different task, because the thing that makes Read & Complete tractable — a hundred words of surrounding context — is gone. Everything you have is one sentence, the visible letters, and whatever the grammar forces.
That narrowing cuts both ways. There is less to read, so twenty seconds is genuinely enough. But when the sentence is ambiguous there is nowhere else to look, and the candidates that survive the letter count have to be separated on grammar alone.
What you actually see
A single sentence, one inline input, a twenty-second timer. Then the next sentence.
- One sentence at a time, typically 8–20 words long.
- A single damaged word showing its opening letters, with the remainder blank.
- Twenty seconds per sentence, running from the moment it appears.
- Six to nine sentences across a full test, unrelated to one another — each is a fresh context.
- No topic thread between items, so nothing carries over from the previous sentence.
When the grammar decides it and the meaning cannot
Consider:
The museum was closed, so we deci—— to walk along the river instead.
Four letters missing after deci. Candidates: decide (two), decided (three), deciding (four), decision (four).
- decide and decided are eliminated on letter count alone.
- decision is a noun; we decision is not a sentence.
- deciding fits the count and the part of speech — but so we deciding to walk has no auxiliary, so it fails too.
Which leaves nothing — and that is the useful lesson. The count here is three, not four, and the answer is decided, matching was closed in the first clause. Miscounting the blanks by one is the single most common way this task is lost, and under a twenty-second timer it happens constantly.
Count the gaps twice. It takes a second and it eliminates most of the field.
How Fill in the Blanks is scored
Each sentence is one item, marked right or wrong. There is no partial credit inside a single word — the restored word matches or it does not — but each sentence is independent, so a run of six sentences is six separate chances.
The sentences you are served get harder or easier as the test adapts, and difficulty here means grammatical complexity as much as vocabulary: subordinate clauses, unusual collocations, and verbs whose form depends on something several words away.
Twenty seconds is generous for this task. Duolingo has not published a speed component, and the practical effect of the timer is simply that an unanswered sentence scores zero.
| What the scorer looks at | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Whether the restored word is exactly right | One item, one binary outcome. Spelling included. |
| Grammatical fit with the whole sentence | Tense, number and part of speech decide most items once the letter count has narrowed the field. |
| Collocation | Some items turn on which word idiomatically follows another rather than on rules. |
| Difficulty of the sentence served | Adaptive weighting — harder sentences carry more information about your level. |
| Answering before the timer | An empty box is a zero; twenty seconds is enough time that this should never happen. |
The mistakes that cost the most
This task has one dominant error and several minor ones. The dominant one is arithmetic.
Do this
- Count the missing letters, then count them again. More items are lost to a miscount than to unknown vocabulary.
- Read the entire sentence before typing, including everything after the gap. The deciding clue is frequently downstream.
- Find the tense marker in the other clause. Sentences pair their verbs, and the intact half tells you what the damaged half must be.
- Check the part of speech the slot requires before you check the meaning — it eliminates candidates faster.
- Type something every time. Twenty seconds is long enough that leaving a blank is pure waste.
Not this
- Do not answer from the first half of the sentence. The clause after the gap decides it more often than the clause before.
- Do not pick a word that fits the meaning but not the count. The count is not a hint; it is a constraint.
- Do not forget agreement in relative clauses — the verb agrees with the noun the clause attaches to, not the nearest noun.
- Do not spend fifteen seconds on one sentence out of stubbornness. Each item is worth the same; the next one may be free.
- Do not assume the answer is a difficult word. Most gaps are ordinary verbs and prepositions.
How to actually get better at Fill in the Blanks
Because each item is one sentence, this is the easiest task to practise in small pockets of time — and the easiest to practise badly, by doing it untimed.
Practise with the clock from day one
Twenty seconds changes the task completely. Untimed practice trains a careful reader; the test is asking for a fast accurate one.
Drill verb forms specifically
Tense agreement across clauses decides more of these items than anything else. An hour on sequence of tenses is worth more here than an hour on vocabulary.
Build the counting habit into a reflex
Before reading for meaning, count the blanks. Making it the first action rather than the last removes the error that costs most.
Collect the ones you miss and sort them
Group your misses into miscount, wrong tense, wrong preposition, unknown word. The pile that is biggest is your actual syllabus.
Use Read & Complete as the volume exercise
A single 100-word C-test passage contains thirty of these decisions. It is the more efficient practice; this task is where you check the skill transferred.
How much this one task moves your score
Six to nine items in a full test, feeding Reading and therefore Literacy and Comprehension.
It shares almost all of its underlying skill with Read & Complete, which is good news: work on either one raises both, and together they are a substantial share of the reading evidence the test collects. Treat them as one study target rather than two.
As with the other objectively-marked tasks, the points here are cheap relative to the productive skills — but they are also capped. Perfect scores on every reading item still leave Writing and Speaking to carry half your overall.
Fill in the Blanks: questions people ask
How is Fill in the Blanks different from Read & Complete?
The mechanic is the same — restore a word from its opening letters — but Fill in the Blanks gives you a single isolated sentence and twenty seconds, while Read & Complete gives you a 100-word passage with many gaps and three minutes. The passage supplies context; the single sentence does not.
How many letters will be missing?
It varies by word, and the number of blanks shown is exact. Counting them is the fastest way to eliminate wrong candidates, and miscounting is the most common cause of a lost mark on this task.
Is twenty seconds enough time?
For most items, comfortably. The sentences are short and the letter count narrows the field quickly. If you are regularly running out of time, the problem is usually that you are reading for meaning before checking the structural constraints.
Does one wrong answer affect the following sentences?
Not in the sense of a penalty. The test is adaptive, so your running performance influences the difficulty of what you are served next — but each sentence is scored on its own and a miss does not reduce credit already earned.
Which subscores does this task affect?
Reading, and through Reading the Literacy and Comprehension integrated subscores. It does not touch Writing or Speaking. See how the eight subscores are built.
Are British and American spellings both accepted?
Both standard spellings are marked correct, so a completion like colour or color counts either way. Because the opening letters are fixed, the only place the two can diverge is the blanked tail, and both forms are accepted there.
Is each word scored all-or-nothing, or is there partial credit within a word?
All-or-nothing per word — you restore it exactly or you score zero on it, with no credit for getting most of the letters right. That is the opposite of Listen & Type, where a near-miss still earns something, and it is why miscounting the blanks is so costly.
Are the missing letters always at the end of the word?
Yes. The opening letters are shown and the remainder is blanked, so you are always completing a word from its start, never filling a gap in the middle. Fixing the stem first and working only on the ending is the reliable way through.
How many Fill in the Blanks sentences are there?
Six to nine in a full test. Each is independent — a fresh context with no thread connecting it to the last one — so a bad item does not carry forward.
Is the answer always a single word?
Yes. One damaged word per sentence, with its opening letters shown and the remainder blank. The number of blanks tells you exactly how many letters are missing.
What kinds of words are usually removed?
Overwhelmingly ordinary ones — verbs in a particular tense, prepositions, and common nouns. The difficulty comes from the grammar deciding which form is correct, not from the word being obscure.
Can I skip a sentence and come back?
No. Each sentence has its own twenty-second window and once it passes you move on. That makes guessing essential — an unanswered item is a certain zero and a constrained guess is a real chance.
Does the twenty-second timer include reading the sentence?
Yes. The clock covers reading, deciding and typing. It is comfortable for most items, which is why running out of time usually means you read for meaning before checking the letter count and the grammar.
Should I study vocabulary for this task?
Less than you would expect. Categorise your wrong answers and most people find the largest piles are tense agreement and prepositions, with genuinely unknown words a distant last. Drill sequence of tenses before you drill word lists.
Is this task easier than Read & Complete?
Mechanically simpler — one gap, not thirty — but strategically harder in one respect: there is no surrounding passage to lean on. When a single sentence is ambiguous you have only the grammar and the letter count, where a C-test gives you a hundred words of context.
Where Fill in the Blanks sits in a full test
No task on the DET is scored in isolation. The adaptive engine is building one picture of your English out of every response, so it helps to know how much of the hour this particular task accounts for and which of the others are drawing on the same ability.
The table below is the whole test. Your current page is highlighted.
| Question type | Time | How often | Subscores it feeds |
|---|---|---|---|
| Read & Complete | 3 minutes | 3–6 times | Reading, Writing |
| Read & Select | 5 seconds | 15–18 times | Reading |
| Fill in the Blanks — you are here | 20 seconds | 6–9 times | Reading, Writing |
| Listen & Type | 1 minute | 6–9 times | Listening, Writing |
| Speak About the Photo | 90 seconds | at least once | Speaking |
| Interactive Speaking | 35 seconds each | 6–7 questions | Speaking, Listening |
| Write About the Photo | 1 minute | at least twice | Writing |
| Interactive Reading | 7 minutes | 2 sets | Reading |
| Interactive Listening | 6 minutes | 2 sets | Listening, Speaking |
| Speaking Sample | 3 minutes | once | Speaking |
| Writing Sample | 5 minutes | once | Writing |
Two things are worth reading off that table. The first is that the tasks feeding Reading and Writing are not only this one — improvement transfers, so time spent here shows up elsewhere. The second is that the tasks taking the largest share of the hour are not the ones most people practise most.
Question types that use the same muscles
Read & Complete
A short passage appears with roughly every second word cut in half. You type the missing letters to restore each damaged word.
Read the guide → ReadingRead & Select
A single word appears. You decide whether it is a real English word or an invented one. Roughly half are invented.
Read the guide → ReadingInteractive Reading
A passage with five linked tasks: completing sentences, choosing what comes next, highlighting the part of the text that answers a question, identifying the main idea, and choosing a title.
Read the guide →Start a practice test
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