Read & Complete
A short passage with roughly every third word missing half its letters. You rebuild it. It is the closest thing the DET has to a pure test of whether you read English or merely decode it.
- 3 min on the clock, 3–6 per full test
- Feeds your Reading and Writing subscores
- Built for the current July 2025 DET format, including the new Interactive Speaking task
Read & Complete — the task most people call the C-test — shows you a passage of around 100 words in which a large share of the words have been cut in half. The first letters are there; the rest is blank. You type what is missing.
It looks like a spelling test and is not one. Almost every blank has exactly one answer that fits the grammar, the collocation and the sense of the sentence at the same time, which means the task is really asking whether you can hold a whole clause in your head while you work on one word inside it. Readers who translate word-by-word stall here immediately; readers who process in phrases barely slow down.
It is also one of the few DET tasks where the answer is objectively right or wrong, so there is no rubric to argue with and no benefit of the doubt to hope for.
What you actually see
A single block of text, a timer, and nothing else. Every damaged word is an input box sitting inline in the sentence, and your cursor jumps to the next one as you fill each in.
- A passage of roughly 100 words on a general-interest topic — science, history, city life. No specialist knowledge is ever required.
- The first one or two sentences usually arrive intact, to give you the topic before the damage starts.
- From there, a regular rhythm of damaged words — commonly around every third word.
- Each damaged word shows its opening letters and leaves the rest blank. The number of blanks tells you exactly how many letters are missing.
- A three-minute countdown per passage. It does not pause.
Rebuilding a sentence, one clue at a time
Take a fragment in the style the test uses:
Volcanoes fo—— where two plates me—. Magma ri—— thr———— the gap and coo—— on the surf——.
Work it in this order and it falls out quickly.
- fo—— — two letters missing, subject is plural (volcanoes), present simple. form. Not forms: the subject is plural, and in any case that is only one letter.
- me— — one letter, after where two plates. meet. The clause is a relative one, so the verb agrees with plates.
- ri—— — Magma is singular and uncountable, so the verb takes -s: rises.
- thr———— — eight letters total after thr. Movement through a gap: through. throughout is too long and means something else.
- coo—— — parallel to rises, so it agrees the same way: cools.
- surf—— — surface. surfing also fits the letters; the sentence does not.
Notice how little of that was vocabulary. Four of the six were decided by subject–verb agreement and letter count alone. That is the task's real subject matter, and it is why grammar drilling moves this score faster than word lists do.
Rebuild this passage
Same mechanic as the real task. Type the missing letters — the cursor advances on its own.
How Read & Complete is scored
Each blank is marked right or wrong on its own, and your total is the proportion you restored correctly. Because the passage is scored blank-by-blank rather than as a whole, a passage you half-finish is worth exactly the half you finished — there is no all-or-nothing cliff, and no reason ever to leave the screen with empty boxes.
Spelling counts, because the word is either the word or it is not. A missing letter in an otherwise correct answer marks that blank wrong. Duolingo has not published whether capitalisation is enforced, so the safe assumption is that it is: match the case the sentence calls for.
What the passage itself contributes matters as much as your answers. The DET is adaptive, so a harder passage — denser vocabulary, longer clauses, more damage — is worth more when you get it right and costs less when you do not. Restoring 70% of a hard passage can be worth more than 90% of an easy one.
| What the scorer looks at | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Proportion of blanks restored | The direct input. Partial completion earns partial credit, so an unfinished box is a wasted one. |
| Exact spelling | A blank is right or wrong. Near-misses do not earn part marks within a single word. |
| Difficulty of the passage you were served | Adaptive weighting: correct answers on a harder passage carry more information about your level. |
| Grammatical accuracy of the restoration | Most blanks are decided by agreement, tense or preposition rather than by knowing a rare word. |
| Finishing inside three minutes | Unattempted blanks score zero. Speed is scored only through how much you complete. |
The mistakes that cost the most
The failure modes here are unusually consistent. In almost every case the reader knew the word and lost the mark anyway.
Do this
- Read the intact opening sentences first. They give you the topic, the register and the tense the rest of the passage runs in.
- Count the blanks before you commit. The letter count eliminates most candidates for free.
- Fill the easy function words first — the, and, with, that — then come back for the content words with more context in place.
- Check subject–verb agreement on every verb you restore. It decides more blanks than vocabulary does.
- Put something in every box before time runs out. A guess with the right letter count is a real chance; an empty box is a guaranteed zero.
Not this
- Do not work strictly left to right. A later word often disambiguates an earlier one, and the strict pass wastes your best clue.
- Do not stall on one blank. Thirty seconds on a single word is a sixth of your time for the whole passage.
- Do not ignore the letter count and answer on meaning alone — that is how recall gets typed into a four-letter gap.
- Do not fix your typos by retyping the whole word under time pressure; you will drop a letter somewhere else.
- Do not assume a plural because the noun before the verb is plural. Find the actual subject of the clause.
How to actually get better at Read & Complete
This task responds to practice faster than any other on the test, because the underlying skill — predicting the next word from context — is trainable with material you already have.
Make your own C-tests from anything you read
Take a paragraph of news or textbook prose, delete the back half of every third word, leave it a day, then restore it. Making them trains the same prediction the test measures.
Drill agreement and prepositions, not vocabulary lists
Go back through your wrong answers and label each one: agreement, tense, preposition, collocation, or genuinely unknown word. Most people find "genuinely unknown word" is the smallest pile by a distance.
Practise finishing before you practise being right
Set 2:30 rather than 3:00 and force yourself to fill every box, accuracy be damned. Then do a normal run. Completion is the habit that actually pays.
Read one long-form article a day, out loud, in phrases
Reading in chunks rather than word by word is the underlying ability. Reading aloud makes chunking audible, so you notice when you have stopped doing it.
Review by category, not by passage
Your report ranks task types. If Read & Complete is near the bottom, the fix is upstream in general reading fluency — and it will lift Interactive Reading at the same time.
How much this one task moves your score
Read & Complete appears several times in a full test and feeds Reading directly, which in turn feeds both Literacy and Comprehension. Two of your eight reported subscores move with it.
Because it is objectively marked, it is also the most reliable place on the test to convert study time into points. Writing and speaking are graded against rubrics with real variance; a restored blank is simply correct. If you are hunting for the cheapest points available to you, they are usually here and in Read & Select.
The ceiling is real, though. Once you are reliably restoring 90% or more, further grinding on this task returns very little, and your time belongs on the productive skills. How the eight subscores combine explains which of your numbers a given task can and cannot move.
Read & Complete: questions people ask
Does spelling have to be perfect in Read & Complete?
Yes. Each blank is judged as a single item — the word you typed either matches or it does not, and there is no partial credit inside one word. The good news is that partial credit does apply across the passage: getting eight of twelve blanks right is worth eight, not zero.
How many words are missing from the passage?
Roughly every third word is damaged, on a passage of about 100 words. The exact proportion varies between passages, and the first sentence or two normally arrive undamaged so you can pick up the topic.
Can I go back and change an answer?
Yes, within the same passage and while the timer is running. You can click or tab between boxes freely. Once you submit the passage or the three minutes expire, it is closed.
Is it better to guess or to leave a blank empty?
Always guess. There is no penalty for a wrong answer on this task beyond the mark you were not going to get anyway, and a guess constrained by the visible letters and the grammar is a genuine chance rather than a random one.
Does Read & Complete affect my speaking or writing subscores?
Not directly. It feeds Reading, and therefore the Literacy and Comprehension integrated subscores. Your Writing and Speaking numbers come from the tasks where you produce language — see how the eight subscores are built.
How many times does Read & Complete appear in a full test?
Twice or three times, each a fresh passage with its own three-minute timer. Because it recurs, a habit that costs you on one passage — freezing on a hard blank, reaching for the mouse between gaps — is a mistake you pay for several times rather than once.
Does British or American spelling matter for the answers?
You never actually choose. This is a C-test, so the first half of each word is already on screen: a gap reading colo__ can be completed only one way, and the visible fragment settles the variant for you. Reconstruct the word the passage used, not the spelling you would prefer.
Should I read the whole passage before filling in any blanks?
No — a full read-through first spends time you do not have. Skim the intact opening for the topic, then work the gaps in order and loop back only to the two or three that resisted, since a later sentence often supplies the word you could not place earlier.
How many blanks are in a Read & Complete passage?
It varies with passage length, but roughly every third word is damaged across about 100 words, so expect somewhere in the region of thirty blanks. The exact count is visible on screen — every gap shows how many letters are missing.
Do I get partial credit if I only finish half the passage?
Yes. Each blank is scored on its own, so half a passage completed correctly is worth half the available marks. This is why filling every box before the timer expires matters more than perfecting the first few.
Does capitalisation matter in Read & Complete?
Duolingo has not published whether it is enforced, so match the case the sentence calls for — capital at the start of a sentence, lower case mid-sentence. It costs nothing to be correct and you cannot rely on leniency that has never been confirmed.
Can I use the Tab key to move between blanks?
Yes, and you should. Reaching for the mouse between every gap wastes several seconds per passage across a three-minute limit. Our practice version also advances automatically once a gap is full.
Are the passages on academic topics?
They are general-interest — science, history, city life, the natural world — and never require specialist knowledge. If you find yourself needing background you do not have, you have misread the sentence rather than met a topic you should have studied.
Why do I run out of time on Read & Complete?
Almost always because of stalling on one hard blank. Thirty seconds spent on a single word is a sixth of your entire budget for the passage. Skip it, finish the rest, and come back — later words frequently disambiguate the one you were stuck on.
Is Read & Complete the same as a cloze test?
It is a C-test, which is a specific variant of cloze. A standard cloze deletes whole words; a C-test deletes the second half of a word and leaves the first half visible. That difference matters — the visible letters constrain the answer far more tightly than a blank space would.
Where Read & Complete 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 — you are here | 3 minutes | 3–6 times | Reading, Writing |
| Read & Select | 5 seconds | 15–18 times | Reading |
| Fill in the Blanks | 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
Fill in the Blanks
A sentence appears with one word partly deleted. The first letter or two are given; you type the rest.
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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