IELTS Reading Passages with Answers and Explanations

Browse IELTS reading passages with full answer keys, per-question explanations, and exam-style practice links.

• The Slow Food Organization

  Slow Food began when Carlo Petrini, an Italian journalist, was dismayed by the opening of a fast food restaurant on the famous Piazza di Spagna in Rome. He decided it was time to celebrate the fast-disappearing virtue...

• The dingo debate

  A plane flies a slow pattern over Carlton Hill station, a 3,600 square kilometre ranch in the Kimberley region in northwest Australia. As the plane circles, those aboard drop 1,000 small pieces of meat, one by one, on...

• Chocolate for the masses

  For almost three thousand years, chocolate was a drink of the elite and the wealthy, originally in South America and later on in Europe. In the early 19th century, however, chocolate became far more widely available,...

• The Fruit Book

  *It’s not every scientist who writes books for people who can’t read. And how many scientists want their books to look as dog-eared as possible? But Patricia Shanley, an ethnobotanist, wanted to give something back. A...

• The lost animals of Australia

  The history of Australia's animals over the past 50,000 years has been largely one of extinction. The time has been too short for new species of large animals to evolve and, over this period, nearly one- third of Aust...

• Effects of changes in world population

  Human fertility rates around the world are dropping for a variety of complex reasons. While the population itself continues to increase, the rate of increase is slowing, and sometime in the next 80 years, world popula...

• The Development of Exploration and Scientific Research in Antarctica

  The modern scientific age in Antarctica really began with the introduction of aircraft in the 1920s. Aircraft transformed the possibilities of exploring the frozen continent around the South Pole, because before that...

• 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...

• Tasmania’s Museum of Old and New Art

  As an eighteen-year-old living in the small Australian island state of Tasmania, moving to the ‘mainland’ could not happen soon enough. Now, ten years later, I look forward to going home. This is probably because I’ve...

• Travelling Plants

  In an English woodland, the blackberry puts out exploratory stems, which curve upwards , waving slowly as though searching. If they touch another plant, they begin to advance directly and purposefully. To us, their mo...

• 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...

• Roller coaster: the great fairground attraction

  Like a passenger train, a roller coaster consists of a series of connected cars that move on a track. But unlike a passenger train, it has no engine or power source of its own. For most of the ride, it is moved only b...

• The Myth of the Eight-hour Sleep

  We often worry about lying awake in the middle of the night – but it could be good for you. Indications from both science and history suggest that the eight-hour sleep may not be a natural or inborn pattern for humans...

• Neanderthal Technology

  We think of our prehistoric ancestors as people of the ice and snow, living in caves, and for many of the west European Neanderthalers that is a just picture of their life. But where there were no caves, further to th...

• 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 Tubingen 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...

• Reef fish study

  It is a widely held belief among those who study animals that larger size conveys some form of advantage throughout life. The idea that certain body characteristics may influence a prey's ability to survive when being...

• Does Class Size Matter?

  Of all the ideas for improving education, few are as simple or attractive as reducing the number of pupils per teacher. Unlike competing proposals for reform, class-size reductions rarely elicit huge outcries or invol...

• Will Eating Less Make You Live Longer?

  Calorie restriction, or ‘semi-starvation' as some refer to it, has been proven to extend lifespan in many living organisms from yeast to mice, but the picture for primates, including humans, is not so clear. Research...

• Biology of Bitterness

  There is a reason why grapefruit juice is served in little glasses: most people don't want to drink more than a few ounces at a time. Naringin, a natural chemical compound found in grapefruit, tastes bitter. Some peop...

• Lean Production innovation – in manufacturing systems

  After the First World War, car makers Henry Ford and Arthur Sloan of General Motors moved world manufacturing from centuries of craft production into the age of mass production. Largely as a result of this, the United...

• Chilli Peppers

  For thousands of years, humans have taken painful pleasure from adding chillies (also known as peppers or chilli peppers) to their food. A study published in the British Medical Journal in 2015 indicated that a diet f...