IELTS Reading Passages with Answers and Explanations
Browse IELTS reading passages with full answer keys, per-question explanations, and exam-style practice links.
- The Constant Evolution of the Humble Tomato
Famous for their taste, color, and organic appearance, heirloom tomatoes are favorites of gardeners and advocates of locally grown foods. The tomato enthusiast might conclude that, given the immense varieties, heirloo...
- Child’s Play in Medieval England
‘Play up! Play up! And play the game!’ The ringing chorus of Sir Henry Newbolt’s celebrated cricket poem ‘Vitai Lampada’ (1908) sums up views about play in 19th- and early 20th-century Britain. Children’s play was imp...
- The costs of brand loyalty
A Londoner with a sudden urge for giant African snails could do worse than head to the bustling marketplace in Brixton, a part of south London that is home to many people from Africa. Markets like Brixton market that...
- 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...
- Babies cry in their mother tongue
It is already known that human foetuses become attentive listeners in the final trimester of pregnancy. ‘The mother's voice in particular is sensed early on,’ explains Professor Amelia Finlayson of the Institute for H...
- 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,...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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...
- Introduction to a book about the assessment of carbon footprints
As this book is about ways of measuring the carbon footprint of particular things, I should start by making it clear what I mean. I am using the word ‘carbon’ as shorthand for all the different global-warming greenhou...
- Book Review: The Discovery of Slowness
The English explorer and writer John Franklin (1786-1847) joined the Navy at the age of 14, and fought at the battle of Trafalgar. When peace came, he turned his attention to Arctic exploration, and in particular to s...
- Book review: Triumph of the City
*Triumph of the City*, by Edward Glaeser, is a thrilling and very readable hymn of praise to an invention so vast and so effective that it is generally taken for granted. More than half the global population already l...
- Mind Music
Ever had a song stuck in your head, playing on an endless loop? Scientists call them 'involuntary musical images', or 'earworms', and a wave of new research is shining light on why they occur and what can be learned f...
- The Peopling of Patagonia
The human settlement of the southern extremity of the Americas has always fascinated prehistorians. Viewed from a global perspective, this was the last major continental land mass to be reached by human beings. The ea...
- The problem with graffiti
The term graffiti derives from the Italian graffito meaning 'scratching' and can be defined as uninvited marking or writing scratched or applied to objects, built structures and natural features. It is not a new pheno...
- Movement Underwater
Self-propelled motion is a fundamental ability in many organisms. From the beating flagella of tiny plankton keeping afloat near the ocean surface to the playful perfection of dolphins surfing the bow wave of a ship,...
- Desertification
The world's great deserts were formed by natural processes interacting over long intervals of time. During most of these times, deserts have grown and shrunk independent of human activities. Paleodeserts, large sand s...
- The Science of Shopping
You may have wondered why so many supermarkets are virtually indistinguishable from each other. It is not, as some might suspect, that the companies operating them lack imagination. It is more that they are all well-v...