IELTS Reading Passages with Answers and Explanations
Browse IELTS reading passages with full answer keys, per-question explanations, and exam-style practice links.
- Born to Trade
Humans are born to trade and we don’t need shops or money to do it—the heart of commerce is an instinctive ability for what anthropologists call “reciprocity”. This is an ability to exchange goods of equal worth, and...
- Investment in Shares vs. Investment in Other Assets
It all began in 1958 with a phone call from Louis Engel, a banker at Merrill Lynch, a US-based financial management company, who wanted to know how investors in shares had performed relative to investors in other asse...
- When people are ‘deaf’ to music
Music has long been considered a uniquely human concept. In fact, most psychologists agree that music is a universal human instinct. Like any ability, however, there is great variation in people’s musical competence....
- 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...
- Some views on the use of headphones
To visit a typical modern office today is to walk into a room with possibly a dozen songs playing simultaneously but to hear none of them. Up to half of younger workers listen to music on their headphones, and nearly...
- Footprints in the Mud
Everybody knows that the dinosaurs became extinct as a result of a large asteroid; something big hit the Earth 65 million years ago and, when the dust had fallen, so had the great reptiles. There is thus a nice, if ir...
- Decision Fatigue
No matter how rational people try to be, they can't make decision after decision without paying a biological price. This 'decision fatigue' is different from ordinary physical fatigue. People are not conscious of bein...
- Marketing and Mind Control
While there had been a long tradition of giving rings as a commitment to marry, the custom of giving diamond engagement rings was, to a large extent, manufactured by one of the most successful marketing campaigns in h...
- A Study of Western Celebrity
It seems that our current society cannot get enough information about the daily lives of celebrities. But how did celebrities become such an important force in our culture? While people have always shared a certain ob...
- The Rise and Fall of Detective Stories
The detective story is normally said to have begun in the fertile brain of the great American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49), especially in his stories featuring the detective C. Auguste Dupin. From 1859, Dupin had...
- Jethro Tull (1674-1741) - Inventor of The Seed Drill
Jethro Tull was a major pioneer in the modernizing of agriculture. He was born in 1674 in Berkshire, southern England, into a family of land-owning gentry. He studied first at Oxford University and then at the Inns of...
- The peopling of Patagonia
The human settlement of the southern extremity of the Americas has always fascinated pre-historians. Viewed from a global perspective, this was the last major continental land mass to be reached by human beings. The e...
- The Dunedin Study in New Zealand
The New Zealand city of Dunedin in the early 1970s can easily be made to sound idyllic. There was next to no unemployment and people left their doors unlocked at night. New Zealand was then the ninth richest country i...
- Petrol power: an eco-revolution?
Laura Ingalls Wilder's semi-autobiographical novel *The Long Winter* describes how the inhabitants of a small town called De Smet in the American Midwest narrowly avoided starvation during the severe winter of 1880–18...
- How are deserts formed
A desert refers to a barren section of land, mainly in arid and semi-arid areas, where there is almost no precipitation and the environment is hostile for any creature to inhabit. Deserts have been classified in a num...
- The History of the Pencil
The history of the pencil starts with a violent thunderstorm. When some particularly ferocious weather struck the Lake District in North West England in the sixteenth century, locals in the village of Borrowdale disco...
- The return of monkey life
Hacienda La Pacifica, a remote working cattle ranch in Guanacaste province of northern Costa Rica, has for decades been home to a community of mantled howler monkeys. Other native primates—white-faced capuchin monkeys...
- Should we stop eating meat?
The call for people to eat less meat to save the planet is growing louder, so if less is good, wouldn't none be better? To find out, let's imagine what would happen if the world eliminated meat, milk and eggs from its...
- The history of the bar code
The first step toward today's bar codes came in 1948, when Bernard Silver, a graduate student in the USA, overheard a conversation in the halls of Philadelphia's Drexel Institute of Technology. The president of a food...
- How a prehistoric predator took to the skies
Pterosaurs existed from the Triassic period, 220 million years ago, to the end of the Cretaceous period, 65 million years ago, when South America pulled away from Africa and the South Atlantic was formed. They are amo...
- Pantomime
A pantomime performance is a unique blend of eccentricity and absurdity, a wild mixture of songs, jokes, outrageous costumes and slapstick physical humour. For many British children, their first family trip to see a p...
- The Oldest Leather Shoe
Archeologists discovered in 2010 what is said to be the world's oldest known leather shoe. The 5,500-year-old shoe, some 1,000 years older than the Egyptian pyramids, was found by scientists excavating a huge cave, de...
- Wood: a valuable resource in New Zealand's economy
During the settlement of New Zealand by European immigrants, natural timbers played a major role. Wood was easily accessible and relatively cheap. A tradition of wooden houses arose, supported by the recognition that...
- Living dunes
Armies of giant sand dunes are advancing across the world's deserts, engulfing anything that crosses their path. They are tens of metres tall and hundreds of metres long. Fortunately, they aren't going very fast. Even...
- How Does Watching Sport Influence the Brain?
During the epoch when the poet Homer unveiled his grand epic, the ancient Greeks initiated a festival where men contended in a race of roughly 200 metres. The victor would be rewarded with a symbolic olive branch. Thi...
- The tuatara – past and future
The New Zealand species of lizard, the tuatara, is firmly embedded in the national psyche: an icon for today which dates from the age of dinosaurs; an ancient reptile commemorated on the back of the five-cent coin. Ne...
- Deep sea discovery
Nico Michiels is an ecologist from the University of Tübingen in Germany who spends part of each year in Egypt, where he dives in the Red Sea, observing fish life and gathering data on its coral reefs. In September 20...
- Playing soccer
Street soccer, as its name implies, is an informal variation of the sport, often played on the street, particularly in urban areas. There are many reasons for the widespread popularity of street soccer. Unlike youth s...
- Rubber
The plants that produce rubber are spread right across the globe, and grow in many different habitats. One might think it likely, therefore, that humankind has known about rubber for thousands of years. Yet, unlike ot...
- The History of Chocolate
Chocolate is now perceived as a ubiquitous indulgence, whether consumed as confectionery or a beverage, readily accessible in global markets. However, it may come as a surprise that chocolate was once regarded as a co...