IELTS Reading Passages with Answers and Explanations
Browse IELTS reading passages with full answer keys, per-question explanations, and exam-style practice links.
- The conquest of malaria in Italy
The word ‘malaria’ means ‘bad air’ in Italian, and this terrible disease marked the life of the people of that country for thousands of years. Yet by 1962, Italy was officially declared malaria-free, and it has remain...
- Tunnelling under the Thames
At the beginning of the 19th century, the port of London was the busiest in the world. Cargoes that had travelled thousands of miles and survived all the hazards of the sea were unloaded on the banks of the Thames, on...
- The Fascinating World of Attine Ants
Leaf-cutting ants and their fungus 'farm' are a marvel of nature and perhaps the best-known example of symbiosis the mutual dependence of two species. Ants cultivate a mushroom-like fungus in 'farms'. Both the ants an...
- The history of the pencil
Pencils have existed for millennia. It is known that the ancient Egyptians, Greeks and Romans all used small pieces of metal as writing instruments, and that 14th-century European artists made pale grey drawings with...
- Inside the Mind of a Fan: How Watching Sport Affects the Brain
At about the same time that the poet Homer invented the epic hero, the ancient Greeks started a festival in which men competed in a single race, about 200 metres long. The winner received a branch of wild olives. The...
- 200 Years of Australian Landscapes at the Royal Academy in London
For the casual viewer, the exhibition of landscapes, Australia, selected by the Royal Academy of Art, will be a spectacular guide through Australian art history. Included in the exhibition are a range of artists and s...
- The Burgess Shale fossils
Some discoveries are so unusual it takes decades and sometimes even centuries to understand their full significance. One such discovery is the fossil bed known as the Burgess Shale, which contains a record of bizarre...
- Traditional Māori Fishing Hooks
The discovery of ancient fishing hooks in New Zealand has revealed that the Maori people were remarkably skilled at crafting highly effective tools for catching fish. These hooks, often made from organic materials suc...
- The Power of Smell
Dog noses are renowned for sensitivity to smells, while human noses are thought to be poor by comparison, yet that might be a misconception. According to recent studies, our noses are in fact acutely sensitive instrum...
- Australia's Megafauna Controversy
Over the past 50 millennia, Australia has witnessed the extinction of many species of large animals, including a rhinoceros-sized wombat and goannas the size of crocodiles. Debate about the possible cause of these ext...
- Flower Power
Why do people give flowers? To offer condolence to those who are grieving. To express gratitude. To ask for forgiveness. There is something undeniably powerful about giving flowers; in fact, few objects provoke such a...
- Elephant communication
O'Connell-Rodwell, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, has travelled to Namibia's first-ever wildlife reserve to explore the mystical and complicated realm of elephant communication. She, along with her coll...
- 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 Evolutionary Mystery: Crocodile Survives
Even though crocodiles have existed for 200 million years, they're anything but primitive. As crocodiles' ancestors, crocodilia came to adapt to an aquatic lifestyle. When most of the other contemporary reptiles went...
- Science and filmmaking
Every year the film academy in the USA celebrates the outstanding achievements of the year in a ceremony known as the Oscars. An increasingly important component of the ceremony is the presentation of the Scientific a...
- The Clipper Races: an era of competition between cargo ships
During the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the British East India Company had the monopoly on trade with China and India. This meant that because no rival could legally import tea or other goods from these count...
- The economic effect of climate
Dr William Masters was reading a book about mosquitoes when an idea struck him. 'There was this anecdote about the yellow fever epidemic that hit Philadelphia in 1793.' Masters recalls. 'This epidemic decimated the ci...
- 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...
- Back to wild
The Przewalski Horse is the last wild horse. The horse is named after the Russian colonel Nikolai Przewalski (the name is of Polish origin and "Przewalski" is the Polish spelling). He was the explorer and naturalist w...
- Intelligent behavior 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, awa...
- Caral: an ancient South American city
Huge earth and rock mounds rise out of the desert of the Supe Valley near the coast of Peru in South America. These immense mounds appear simply to be part of the geographical landscape in this arid region squeezed be...
- The dingo debate
A plane flies a slow pattern over Carlton Hill station, a 3,600 square kilometre ranch in the Kimberley region in northwest Australia. As the plane circles, those aboard drop 1,000 small pieces of meat, one by one, on...
- The New Zealand writer Margaret Mahy
In a career spanning some fifty years, Margaret Mahy has come to occupy a unique place in New Zealand writing with innovative fiction and original characterisation. In our solidly realist tradition, the linguistic fir...
- Facial Expression
A facial expression is one or more motions or positions of the muscles in the skin. These movements convey the emotional state of the individual to observers. Facial expressions are a form of nonverbal communication....
- 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...
- 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...
- 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...
- Understanding symbols
About 20 years ago I had one of those wonderful moments when research takes an unexpected but fruitful turn. I had been studying toddler memory and was beginning a new experiment with two-and-a-half- and three-year-ol...
- The benefits of learning an instrument
Are music lessons the way to get smarter? That's what a lot of parents and experts believe: studying an instrument gives children an advantage in the development of their intellectual, perceptual, and cognitive skills...
- The Pixar Story
Between 2000 and 2005. under former Chief Executive Officer (CEO) Michael D. Eisner, Walt Disney Company set its shareholder meetings in a series of cold-weather cities during cold-weather months. Many suspected that...