IELTS Reading Passages with Answers and Explanations
Browse IELTS reading passages with full answer keys, per-question explanations, and exam-style practice links.
- Manage Your Energy, Not Your Time
At our company, the Energy Project, we have worked with thousands of executives and, with remarkable consistency, they tell us they're pushing themselves harder than ever to keep up. The problem with working longer ho...
- The early history of Scott and Bowne’s cod liver oil
Cod liver oil is a type of fish oil used today for general health purposes, but northern European fishing communities used cod liver for centuries before the doctors and chemists of 19th-century Europe began to take a...
- The origins of cinema
Many consider that the history of motion pictures began in 1824, when the British doctor Peter Mark Roget described an optical effect he called *persistence of vision* - the illusion of movement created when a series...
- Research into the effects of different teaching styles
Prior to 1960, most inquiries into pupils' learning skills explored the relationship between factors such as children's social background, personality or measured intelligence and their achievement in various school s...
- The Causes of Linguistic Change
All living languages undergo changes of various kinds, for which there are various reasons. The changes that have caused most dispute are those in pronunciation. We have various sources of evidence for the pronunciati...
- Health In The Wild
For the past decade Dr Engel, a lecturer in environmental sciences at Britain's Open University, has been collating examples of self-medicating behavior in wild animals. She recently published a book on the subject. I...
- Who looks after the children in today's Britain?
When Simon Baron-Cohen recently published a book, *The Essential Difference*, in which he claimed that the female brain is predominantly hard-wired for empathy, the male brain is predominantly hard-wired for understan...
- Healthy buildings, productive people
Have you felt tired at your desk lately? According to new research, some often overlooked environmental factors within buildings - the degree or type of ventilation, airborne contaminants, lighting and noise levels, f...
- Who wrote Shakespeare's plays?
Even today, almost 400 years after his death, the works of the famous English dramatist William Shakespeare have lost none of their appeal, nor have questions about the source of his genius. For is it really credible...
- A Brief History of Tea
The story of tea began in ancient China over 5,000 years ago. According to legend, the Emperor Shen Nung was a skilled ruler, creative scientist and patron of the arts. His far sighted edicts required, among other thi...
- The Baobabs of Madagascar
The island of Madagascar in the Indian Ocean is the best place in the world to see baobabs. These spectacular trees, with their massive trunks and distinctive horizontal root-like branches, can live over 800 years. Of...
- How to clean a beach
After the oil-tanker Prestige spilt her cargo just off north-west Spain in November 2002, the beautiful beaches of the Galician coastline were a metre deep in a mixture of oil and sea water. The Prestige was only one...
- Research into the effects of different teaching styles
Prior to 1960, most inquiries into pupils' learning skills explored the relationship between factors such as children's social background, personality or measured intelligence and their achievement in various school s...
- A brome lives on: How a British grass escaped extinction
An inconspicuous grass, interrupted brome', once thought extinct, is being reintroduced into fields. Called interrupted brome because of the widely spaced seeds on its seedhead, this undistinguished British grass was...
- Health In The Wild
For the past decade Dr Engel, a lecturer in environmental sciences at Britain's Open University, has been collating examples of self-medicating behavior in wild animals. She recently published a book on the subject. I...
- The Causes of Linguistic Change
All living languages undergo changes of various kinds, for which there are various reasons. The changes that have caused most dispute are those in pronunciation. We have various sources of evidence for the pronunciati...
- Lawrence Johnston and Hidcote Garden
Today, the National Trust in the UK administers hundreds of public gardens, while sixty-odd years ago there was only one, Hidcote Manor near the English village of Chipping Campden. In 1949 Hidcote attracted a mere 60...
- Antarctic architecture: Halley VI
One morning in 2004, Hugh Broughton was listening to the radio when two voices caused him to pay attention. One of them he recognised through his work as an architect. It was the President of the Royal Institute of Br...
- Antonio Stradivari – violin maker supreme
From the 1670s onwards, the violin maker Antonio Stradivari (1644-1737) successfully applied his inspired vision and enormous attention to detail to the artistic and commercial challenges of running an international h...
- The return of the black-footed ferret
The black-footed ferret (*Mustela nigripes*) is a small carnivorous mammal, similar in length to a domestic cat, and is the only ferret species native to North America. For at least 100,000 years they lived in an area...
- A Brief History of Glassmaking
The first known glass objects can be traced back to the ancient Eastern empires, in about 3500 BC, building on existing knowledge about glazes, a new material, including sand and metal oxides, was developed. This mate...
- Rights for apes
A growing number of people across the world are attempting to persuade governments to grant great apes rudimentary 'human rights'. They argue that great apes are enough like us to deserve special treatment over other...
- Termite Mounds
To most of us, termites are destructive insects which can cause damage on a devastating scale. But according to Dr Rupert Soar of Loughborough University’s School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, these pes...
- Early Approaches to Organisational Design
Determining the ‘best’ type of organisational structure for a particular situation has long been an important task for managers in all types of organisations. All structures have advantages and disadvantages and manag...
- Father of modern management
Peter Drucker was one of the most important management thinkers of the past hundred years. He wrote about 40 book and thousands of articles and he never rested in his mission to persuade the world that management matt...
- How tennis rackets have changed
In 2016, the British professional tennis player Andy Murray was ranked as the world’s number one. It was an incredible achievement by any standard – made even more remarkable by the fact that he did this during a peri...
- The Placebo Effect
Want to devise a new form of alternative medical treatment? No problem. Here’s the recipe. As a practitioner, be warm, sympathetic, reassuring and enthusiastic. Your treatment should involve physical contact, and each...
- Antarctic research
New Zealand’s contribution to International Polar Year was a 52-day voyage by the ship Tangaroa in order to conduct research in Antarctica’s Ross Sea. Lead scientist Mary Livingston emphasises just what a multi-facete...
- The Impact of the Potato
The potato was first cultivated in South America between three and seven thousand years ago, though scientists believe they may have grown wild in the region as long as 13,000 years ago. The genetic patterns of potato...
- Insect-inspired robots
A tiny insect navigates its way across featureless salt-pans. A cockroach successfully works out how to scramble over an obstacle. The mantis shrimp scans its aquatic world through hyperspectral eyes. Using the most b...