IELTS Reading Passages with Answers and Explanations
Browse IELTS reading passages with full answer keys, per-question explanations, and exam-style practice links.
- 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...
- 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...
- Biophilic Design
Biophilic design, a movement related to green architecture, has gained much momentum within the building community in recent years. The premise of biophilic design seeks both to avoid or minimize harmful impacts on th...
- Saving the Skink
New Zealand's reptiles come in three forms: the tuatara, the geckos and the skinks. With their gleaming scales, long bodies and often surprisingly short limbs, skinks are instantly recognisable. There are more than 90...
- Dolls through the ages
Dolls have been a part of humankind for thousands of years. Often depicting religious figures, or used as playthings, early dolls were probably made from primitive materials such as clay, fur, or wood.
- Jean Piaget 1896 – 1980
Jean Piaget spent much of his professional life listening to children, watching children and poring over reports of researchers around the world who were doing the same. He found, to put it most succintly, that childr...
- The Pirahã people of Brazil
The Pirahã tribe live deep in Brazil's Amazon forest, and their language is hotly debated by linguists. Since 1977, the ethnologist Daniel Everett has spent a total of seven years living with the Pirahã and has commit...
- Intelligent behaviour in birds
For centuries, many scholars maintained that humans were the only intelligent organism on Earth. Many traits were considered to be exclusively human examples of acumen for example, language, tool use, deception, aware...
- Jellyfish – The Dominant Species
Jellyfish have become the curse of beach holidays, permeating every ocean on the globe, thriving in the Arctic and the tropics. In an ever-changing world where other species struggle to endure, jellyfish populations a...
- Pearls
Long known as the "Queen of Gems", pearls possess a history and allure far beyond what today's wearer may recognize. Throughout much of recorded history, a natural pearl necklace comprised of matched spheres was a tre...
- Dust and the American West
Images of deserts in the United States show dusty, barren landscapes, but the land may not always have been this way. Ever since settlers moved west across the US, there has been dust, clouds of it, everywhere. It was...
- The early history of olive oil
Olive oil is produced from the fruit of the olive tree, which is a member of the Oleaceae plant family. The trees require some cold weather during the year, but also tolerate hot, dry conditions, and do not like moist...
- Urban Regeneration: an award-winning redevelopment project in Berlin
Just over a kilometer south of Berlin's Potsdamer Platz, near the left bank of the Landwehr Canal, an extensive, triangular-shaped area of waste ground once separated the neighbourhoods of Kreuzberg to the east and Sc...
- Carnivorous plants
The naturalist and author of On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin, was fascinated by carnivorous plants. In 1860, soon after he came across his first carnivorous plant — the sundew, Drosera — he wrote, 'I care mor...
- Ancient Rome: archaeologists are trying to understand more about the early history of the city
From ancient times to the present, historians have asked the question: 'How and why did an ordinary little town in central Italy grow so much bigger than any other in the ancient Mediterranean and come to control such...
- Solving the problem of waste disposal
For many years, burning rubbish has been portrayed as the lazy option when it comes to dealing with the problem of waste disposal, since it sends toxic fumes into the air and appears to support a consumerist, throwawa...
- The development of plastics
The first plastics were developed as a substitute for natural rubber. Chemically, rubber is a polymer-a compound containing large molecules that are formed by the bonding of many smaller, simpler units, repeated over...
- Robert Louis Stevenson
It is more than 100 years since the death of the Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson on the South Pacific island of Samoa, and it seems that time has not been kind to Stevenson's memory. Immediately after his death...
- 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...
- Translating: a key to international understanding?
The term 'translation' is used for all cases where the meaning of expressions in one language (the 'source' language) is turned into the meaning in another (the target language), whether the medium is spoken, written,...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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...
- The history of the guitar
The earliest stringed instruments currently known to archaeologists are bowl harps. For millennia, people made bowl harps using, for example, tortoise shells as resonators, with a bent stick for a neck and one or more...
- 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 Austr...
- 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...
- 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...