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 Sunlight Soap Story
The first bars of Sunlight soap rolled off the Lever Brothers production line in January 1886 at their factory in England. The Lever brothers - William and James - were respectively the seventh and eighth in a family...
- 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...
- 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 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...
- Ahead of its time
One October afternoon, a young New Zealander, Sam Tobin, called his dogs and went for a walk down to the nearby Ruamahanga River. Having been very high for days, the river had at last fallen, and Tobin was eager to se...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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...
- The plan to bring an asteroid to Earth
Send a robot into space, catch an asteroid and bring it back to Earth’s orbit. This, say scientists and engineers at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), could be feasible. A four-day workshop was dedicat...
- The Tasmanian Tiger
The Tasmanian tiger, or thylacine, was a carnivorous marsupial (a meat-eating mammal which carries its young in a pouch). It was given the name ‘tiger’ because it had striped fur, and because it was ferocious. Between...
- Katherine Mansfield
Katherine Mansfield Beauchamp Murry was born in 1888, into a prominent family in Wellington, New Zealand. She became one of New Zealand’s best-known writers, using the pen name of Katherine Mansfield. The daughter of...
- The Robbers Cave Study
Group self-centredness seems to occur the minute people are divided into groups. It doesn’t matter what the group is, or on what basis it was formed, we perceive the group we belong to as being superior to other group...
- Keeping the water away
Recently, winter floods on the rivers of central Europe have been among the worst for 600 to 700 years, and dams and dykes (protective sea walls) have failed to solve the problem. Traditionally, river engineers have t...
- Traditional Maori Medicine
The Maori are the indigenous people of the islands of New Zealand. Their traditional medicine, which is believed to date back as far as the 13th century, was a system of healing that was passed down through the genera...
- Listening to the Ocean
The oceans cover more than 70 per cent of the planet’s surface, yet until quite recently we knew less about their depths than about the surface of the Moon. The Moon has been far more accessible to study because astro...
- Yawning
When Robert R. Provine began studying yawning in the 1960s, it was difficult for him to convince research students of the merits of ‘yawning science’. Although it may appear quirky to some, Provine’s decision to study...
- Fishbourne Roman Palace
Fishbourne Roman Palace is in the village of Fishbourne in West Sussex, England. This large palace was built in the 1st century AD, around thirty years after the Roman conquest of Britain, on the site of Roman army gr...
- An important language development
Cuneiform, the world's first known system of handwriting, originated some 6,000 years ago in Sumer in what is now southern Iraq. It was most often inscribed on palm-sized, rectangular clay tablets measuring several ce...
- A closer examination of a study on verbal and non-verbal messages
The findings of a study on verbal and non-verbal messages in communication by Albert Mehrabian and his colleagues at UCLA* in 1967 have been quoted so frequently that they are now often regarded as a self-evident truth.
- The internal body clock
From buffalo to bacteria, oaks to algae, all life follows the same relentless 24-hour cycle, which is driven by the rising and setting of the Sun. Or is it? Over 250 years ago, a French scientist performed a simple ex...
- Herbal Medicine
There is an age-old practice of harvesting plants and herbs in their natural environment for use as medicines. And today there is huge potential for New Zealand to develop a herb industry based on the excellent growin...
- The Whale Goes to Court
In 1818 a whale became the subject of a controversial court case in New York City. The case involved an old law requiring those who sold fish oil to pay a fee in order to have their barrels inspected by city officials...
- Mapping the Mind
The often used phrase ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’ betrays a very intimate fact of human nature. We are visual creatures and we rely on sight to serve as a judge of what is real and what is not. When discussing the...
- The Role of Mothers in the Origins of Music
In a recent lecture Richard Parncutt, a professor of systematic musicology at the University of Graz, Austria, discussed the idea that music originated from 'motherese' – the playful voices mothers use when speaking t...
- Why good ideas fail
TF became a retail success in the 1970s when it succeeded in spotting homeware trends and meeting the needs of its then trendy young customers. However, by 2004, the TF stores were failing and a rethink was clearly ne...
- Sydney Opera House
In 1956 the Premier of New South Wales, Australia, announced an international competition for the design of an opera house for Sydney. It attracted more than 200 entries from around the world and was won by Jørn Utzon...
- Pacific Navigation and Voyaging
The many tiny islands of the Pacific Ocean had no human population until ancestors of today’s islanders sailed from Southeast Asia in ocean-going canoes approximately 2,000 years ago. At the present time, the debate c...
- The Significant Role of Mother Tongue in Education
One consequence of population mobility is an increasing diversity within schools. To illustrate, in the city of Toronto in Canada, 58% of kindergarten pupils come from homes where English is not the usual language of...