IELTS Reading Passages with Answers and Explanations
Browse IELTS reading passages with full answer keys, per-question explanations, and exam-style practice links.
- Drawing Lessons from History
Numerous ancient civilisations collapsed or disappeared, leaving behind grand ruins reminiscent of what poet Shelley described in his sonnet Ozymandias. The term 'collapse' refers to a significant reduction in populat...
- 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.
- The fluoridation controversy
The long-standing debate about whether to fluoridate our drinking water continues Fluoridation is the addition of fluorine to public water supplies with the aim of reducing tooth decay. The fluorine, when mixed with w...
- STRESS LESS
How busy is too busy? For some it means sometimes having to have a short lunch; for others it may mean missing lunch altogether. For a few, it is not being able to take a day off once a month. Then there is a group of...
- Playing with science
The connection between science and play is not often discussed, perhaps because scientists take it for granted, or because they are a little self-conscious about it and therefore try to hide it. In this context, play...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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 pa...
- Tulip Mania
A Centuries before anyone ever heard of high-tech stocks such as Qualcomm, CMGI, or Cisco Systems, a tulip in 17th century Holland caused quite the stir. The Semper Augustus was a tulip of extraordinary grandeur, with...
- 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 plant
The naturalist and author of 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 more about...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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 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...
- 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 may sound a ridiculous plan, but it was discussed quite seriously recently by a group of scientists and engineers at the California I...
- 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...