IELTS Reading Passages with Answers and Explanations
Browse IELTS reading passages with full answer keys, per-question explanations, and exam-style practice links.
- 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...
- What Lucy Taught Us
On a Sunday morning in late November 1974, a team of scientists were digging in an isolated spot in the Afar region of Ethiopia. Surveying the area, palaeoanthropologist Donald Johanson spotted a small piece of bone....
- Marketing and the Information Age
For the early practitioners of marketing in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, the business of selling was simply a matter of continually finding new customers. By contrast, marketing managers in the current era...
- The Origin of Paper
The word paper derives from the Greek term for the ancient Egyptian writing material called papyrus. In about 2400 BC, the Egyptians discovered how to make a writing surface out of papyrus, a type of reed that grows a...
- The Exploration of Mars
In 1877, Giovanni Schiaparelli, an Italian astronomer, made drawings and maps of the Martian surface that suggested strange features. The images from telescopes at that time were not as sharp as today’s. Schiaparelli...
- Sorry - who are you?
It was Jacob Hodes’s first day at college. He can still recall spending an enjoyable afternoon being shown around campus by a second-year student named Daniel Byrne, who happened to be from his home town. Jacob then s...
- The Blockbuster Phenomenon: A New Museum Trend
Since the 1980s, the term ‘blockbuster’ has become the fashionable word for spectacular, high-profile museum exhibitions that have the ability to attract large crowds. A blockbuster is a ‘large-scale loan exhibition t...
- The importance of law
The law influences all of us virtually all the time, it governs almost all aspects of our behavior, and even what happens to us when we are no longer alive. It affects us from the embryo onwards. It governs the air we...
- Termite Mounds
To most of us, termites are destructive insects which can cause damage on a devastating scale. But according to Dr Rupert Soar of Loughborough University’s School of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, these pes...
- Early Approaches to Organisational Design
Determining the ‘best’ type of organisational structure for a particular situation has long been an important task for managers in all types of organisations. All structures have advantages and disadvantages and manag...
- What is an unfair advantage in sport?
What happened to the Australian athlete Ron Clarke in the 10,000 metres at the Mexico City Olympics of 1968 is now virtually forgotten, though at the time it was headline news. Clarke was the greatest distance runner...
- The Slow Food Organization
Slow Food began when Carlo Petrini, an Italian journalist, was dismayed by the opening of a fast food restaurant on the famous Piazza di Spagna in Rome. He decided it was time to celebrate the fast-disappearing virtue...
- Insect-inspired robots
A tiny insect navigates its way across featureless salt-pans. A cockroach successfully works out how to scramble over an obstacle. The mantis shrimp scans its aquatic world through hyperspectral eyes. Using the most b...
- Mammoth Kill
Although it’s hard to imagine in this age of urban sprawl and automobiles, North America once belonged to huge, elephant-like mammoths, camels, bear-sized beavers and other giant beasts, collectively known as ‘megafau...
- Clarence Birdseye and the Development of Frozen Food
Born in 1886 in New York, the American naturalist Clarence Birdseye had an instinctive curiosity, a love of food, and a strong entrepreneurial streak. At the age of ten, he was hunting, selling live animals, and teach...
- A new look for Talbot Park
The new Talbot Park is immediately eye-catching because the buildings look quite different to other state-housing projects in Auckland. ‘There is no reason why state housing should look cheap in my view,’ says archite...
- New Zealand home textile crafts of the 1930s to 1950s
Domestic crafts do not build monuments to their makers, nor do they create wealth, and too often they have not survived. In consequence, the domestic crafts produced by mothers, grandmothers and great grandmothers in...
- The Voynich Manuscript
The starkly modern Beinecke Library at Yale University is home to some of the most valuable books in the world: first folios of Shakespeare, Gutenberg Bibles and manuscripts from the early Middle Ages. Yet the library...
- The Importance of Business Cards
The ritual may be universal, but the details of business cards and how they are swapped vary across countries. Americans throw their cards casually across a table; the Japanese make the exchange of cards a formal cere...
- Who wrote Shakespeare's plays?
Even today, almost 400 years after his death, the works of the famous English dramatist William Shakespeare have lost none of their appeal, nor have questions about the source of his genius. For is it really credible...
- 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...
- Classical music over the centuries
The production of any great art form, and classical music is no exception, does not usually occur in a society dominated by the basic material demands of food and shelter. Art and music have flourished in those period...
- Changes to the Soviet Union's working week
The Soviet Union's first Five Year Plan was intended to turn the weak and undeveloped country into a powerful, modern, industrial nation. Following its introduction in 1928, production of coal, iron and steel increase...
- 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...
- Health In The Wild
For the past decade Dr Engel, a lecturer in environmental sciences at Britain’s Open University, has been collating examples of self-medicating behaviour in wild animals. She recently published a book on the subject....
- Biomimicry
Velcro, now commonly used instead of buttons and zippers, is probably the most famous example of ‘biomimicry’, where technologists turn to nature for inspiration. In 1948, scientist Georges de Mestral was walking thro...
- Seaweed
Seaweed, a common plant that grows in the sea, has been an important food, fuel, and fertilizer since prehistoric times. For example, it has supplemented the diet of sheep in the Orkneys, islands off the coast of Scot...
- New filter promises clean water for millions
A handful of clay, yesterday’s coffee grounds and some cow manure are the ingredients that could bring clean, safe drinking water to many developing countries. The simple new technology, developed by Australian Nation...
- 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...
- Research into the effects of different teaching styles
Prior to 1960, most inquiries into pupils' learning skills explored the relationship between factors such as children's social background, personality or measured intelligence and their achievement in various school s...