IELTS Reading Passages with Answers and Explanations
Browse IELTS reading passages with full answer keys, per-question explanations, and exam-style practice links.
- The Long Road to Artificial Intelligence
In 1950, the computing pioneer Alan Turing published a paper in the journal Mind entitled 'Computing Machinery and Intelligence'. It was the first serious, scholarly treatment of the concept of Artificial Intelligence...
- New Understanding of Giraffes in the Wild
Even as the tallest animals on Earth, giraffes can be easy to overlook. Despite being a favorite in zoos, until recently almost nobody studied giraffes in the wild. 'When I first became interested in giraffes in 2008...
- The Origin and Development of Applause
Scholars aren't quite sure about the origins of applause, but the form that is still most common, clapping the hands together, was formalized in Western culture during and after performances. During the time of the Ro...
- The geography of taste buds
Scientists have long known that the surface of the tongue is covered with taste buds: onion-shaped bundles of cells that stand guard for the digestive system. Long before our modern world of supermarkets and restauran...
- How do plants talk to each other?
In 1983, plant scientists Jack Schultz and Ian Baldwin reported that the leaves of young maple trees increased their defense systems when exposed to maples that had been damaged by plant-eating (herbivorous) insects....
- Living walls – a successful environmental project
Canadian entrepreneur Alan Darlington, president of Nedlaw Living Walls and holder of a PhD in plant sciences, admits that people may have a point when they say that academics don’t necessarily make good businessmen....
- A Brief History of Glassmaking
The first known glass objects can be traced back to the ancient Eastern empires, in about 3500 BC. Building on existing knowledge about glazes, a new material, including sand and metal oxides, was developed. This mate...
- Rights for apes
A growing number of people across the world are attempting to persuade governments to grant great apes rudimentary 'human rights'. They argue that great apes are enough like us to deserve special treatment over other...
- Look – who was talking
When did we start talking to each other and how long did it take us to become so good at it? One view of language development, held by linguists such as Noam Chomsky and anthropologists such as Richard Klein, is that...
- 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...
- Antarctic architecture: Halley VI
One morning in 2004, Hugh Broughton was listening to the radio when two voices caused him to pay attention. One of them he recognised through his work as an architect. It was the President of the Royal Institute of Br...
- 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 Franks, told of an extraordinary event in what is now Switzerland, where the Rhone River spills into Lake Geneva. He wrote of a...
- 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...
- 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...
- The origin of language
Theories on the origin and evolution of language have been a major area of my research for many years. By 1859, when British scientist Charles Darwin published The Origin of Species, there was already a great deal of...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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...
- Sir Francis Ronalds 1788 – 1873
Francis Ronalds was born in London in 1788, the second of eleven children. When he was nineteen his father died, and as the eldest son, the young Ronalds had to assume the responsibility of running the family's cheese...
- Healthy buildings, productive people
Have you felt tired at your desk lately? According to new research, some often overlooked environmental factors within buildings – the degree or type of ventilation, airborne contaminants, lighting and noise levels, f...
- Andrew Carnegie: industrialist and philanthropist
The Scottish-born American industrialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, who was the leader of the American steel industry from 1873 to 1901, donated large sums of his fortune to educational, cultural, and scienti...
- The psychology of new product adoption
An American philosopher once said, "If a man can ... make a better mousetrap than his neighbor... the world will make a beaten path to his door." If only marketing innovation was that simple. In today's marketplace, c...
- Multi-tasking and the brain
Do you think you're a master of multi-tasking? Think again. Unless you are one of the three percent of super-taskers in the population, research shows that your brain isn't capable of paying close attention to more th...
- William Gilbert and Magnetism
The 16th and 17th centuries saw two great pioneers of modern science: Galileo and Gilbert. The impact of their findings is eminent. Gilbert was the first modern scientist, the accredited father of the science of elect...
- Rebranding art museums
As anyone with even a passing interest in cultural institutions will know, art museums are adapting to keep up with changes in society. Do any of these newly developed spaces indicate a fundamental shift in the ways w...
- The origins of tennis
The game of tennis has a very long history. It is officially still known as 'lawn tennis', partly because it was originally only played on grass, and also to distinguish it from the older game known as 'real tennis',...
- A survivor's story
As an island country with a fauna dominated by birds, New Zealand was once home to an owl species which is now extinct, the laughing owl, named for its distinctive cry. This bird was widespread throughout the islands...