IELTS Reading Passages with Answers and Explanations
Browse IELTS reading passages with full answer keys, per-question explanations, and exam-style practice links.
- Bird Migration
Birds are highly mobile and among the swiftest of living creatures. Flight gives them the power to move in any direction for as long as they have the energy to keep going. They are equipped with lightweight, hollow bo...
- Charles Heaphy and the settlement of New Zealand
In the early 19th century, the London-based New Zealand Company was set up to promote the colonisation of the North and South Islands of New Zealand. It hoped to encourage British migrants to settle there and buy land...
- Traditional Farming in Zambia’s Luapula Province
By tradition, land in Luapula Province is not owned by individuals, but, as in many other parts of Africa, is allocated by the headman or headwoman of a village to people of either sex according to need. Since land is...
- Effect and Cause
In the sixth century Gregory of Tours, a chronicler of the Germanic people known as the Rhone River spills into Lake Geneva. He wrote of a big rockfall in the year 563 AD in the vicinity of a place called Tauredunum....
- 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...
- Walking and shoes in eighteenth-century London
It was difficult to get about in eighteenth-century London. During the first half of that century, the physical mobility of the upper classes in the city had been considerably restricted: the poor condition of the str...
- Risk taking
We run risks. Most of the time we ignore them; sometimes we stop and decide how to deal with them. That's life. Risks arise in sports, in business, in personal relationships; they are present in the laboratory, in pol...
- Australia's Airborne Dentists
Australians living or travelling in rural and remote areas can face particular difficulties when they need medical care. Hundreds of kilometres from major cities and many hours by road from the closest hospital or cli...
- Why Do We Need Sleep?
According to the United States (U.S.) Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), more than 80 million American adults are chronically sleep deprived, meaning they sleep less than the recommended minimum of seve...
- On art and artists
There really is no such thing as art, only artists. Once these were people who took coloured earth and roughed out the forms of a bison on the wall of a cave; today some buy their paints, and others design posters for...
- The Purpose of Facial Expressions
The use of facial expressions for measuring people’s emotions has dominated psychology since the late 1960s. This was when Paul Ekman of the University of California pioneered the idea that, by carefully measuring fac...
- A River Reveals its Roman Past
2,000 years ago the town of Arles, in what is now south-western France, was a busy gateway to the area of the Roman Empire known as Gaul. Goods from all over the Mediterranean were transferred there to barges - long,...
- Lawrence Johnston and Hidcote Garden
Today, the National Trust in the UK administers hundreds of public gardens, but sixty-odd years ago there was only one: Hidcote Manor near the English village of Chipping Campden. In 1949, Hidcote attracted a mere 600...
- From princes to paupers: how Goya's portraits tell the story of Spain
There are, according to current scholarship, 160 existing portraits by Francisco de Goya - about a third of his painted output. The real number, though, is much greater since there are no pure landscapes in Goya's wor...
- Face recognition in everyday life
Remembering faces is a skill that is in daily use, but in real life we are not often called on to recognise people by their faces alone. Information about a person's identity is supplied by body build, clothes, gait,...
- The ability to communicate using language
A research question of continuing interest to modern academics concerns the origins of nouns, verbs, adjectives and so on - in other words, all the separate components that make up human language. Did they come about...
- The return of the black-footed ferret
The black-footed ferret (*Mustela nigripes*) is a small carnivorous mammal, similar in length to a domestic cat, and is the only ferret species native to North America. For at least 100,000 years they lived in an area...
- Images and Places
Human beings naturally become attached to places they visit or inhabit and these emotional attachments have become increasingly important in research on recreation sites and activities. Research into this phenomenon i...
- All in the family
We can choose our friends, the saying goes, but we cannot choose our family of origin. Our parents provide the genetic material and make powerful early role models, but even more influential in determining what kind o...
- Sea Change for Salinity
Beneath the flat, impassive surface of Australia lie hidden mountains, valleys and gorges - ancient traps and channels for the deadly salt that is stealthily killing so much of the Australian landscape. The war on sal...
- The Olmec and their great stone heads
The Olmec civilisation thrived in what is today eastern Mexico, along the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, from 1200 to 400 BC. The Olmec was the first major culture in Mesoamerica, a geographical area including Mexico an...
- Transport and transport systems during the Roman Empire
At the height of the Roman Empire in the 2nd century AD, it was not uncommon for Romans to travel long distances by road across Europe and beyond. In fact, it was actually quite easy to travel, thanks to the empire's...
- Think Small
The new US headquarters of Izon are situated in Cambridge, Massachusetts, one of the most important global centres of scientific research and technology. Half the other offices in the building Izon shares have scienti...
- The Changing Face of Farming in the Canterbury Region of New Zealand
The landscape of the rural Canterbury plains in the South Island of New Zealand has been changing since Europeans first arrived in the country some 200 years ago, but in recent decades the speed of change has increase...
- The unsung sense
Traditionally, smell has not been at the forefront of sensory research, pushed aside in favour of the seemingly more vital senses of vision and hearing. There has been a strong belief that people, especially compared...
- Liquorice
Liquorice is a type of sweet snack with a semi-firm consistency, often black or red in colour, flavoured with the extract of the root of the liquorice plant. In recent years it has been marketed as a healthier snack f...
- The extinction of the cave bear
Hervé Bocherens, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Tübingen, Germany, says his colleagues find his research methods a little 'crude'. He dissolves 30,000-year-old animal bones in hydrochloric acid, which...
- The art of deception
Forty years ago, the research psychologist Dr Paul Ekman was addressing a group of young psychiatrists in training when he was asked a question, the answer to which has kept him busy ever since. Suppose the group want...
- How to be Happy
A psychiatrist Tony Fernando was walking down the street when he saw a group of young homeless men sitting on the footpath. As Fernando handed out gifts of food, he tried to video the men’s reactions in his mind, reco...
- Surviving city life
Ecologists often prefer to study plants and animals in exotic locations, but a growing number have turned their attention to the complex interactions of the wildlife that inhabits concrete jungles. Inner-city Sydney i...