IELTS Reading Passages with Answers and Explanations
Browse IELTS reading passages with full answer keys, per-question explanations, and exam-style practice links.
- 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...
- 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...
- 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...
- 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...
- Why don't we sleep?
Fifty-six million prescriptions for sleeping medication were handed out by doctors in America last year. Yet remarkably little is being done to understand insomnia's root causes. Socially and economically, the undertr...
- New Technology in New Zealand's Health Service
At some time in their lives, nearly all New Zealanders will have to attend an after-hours clinic following an emergency or accident. On entering the consulting room, the patient is faced with a barrage of questions. T...
- IQ Scores
Studies from numerous countries suggest that IQ scores have been rising fast since at least the 1950s - enough to mean that someone with an IQ classed as average at that time could be labelled as having low Intelligen...
- Science in the kitchen
There is a recent movement in the world of food, in which chefs are collaborating with scientists to teach themselves the chemistry and physics of cuisine. Even academics are getting excited about the results. Colin O...
- The Origins of Weather Forecasting
The world's first public weather forecast appeared in The Times newspaper over 150 years ago: the beginning of a service that gives everyone something to comment on. The pioneering forecast on August 1, 1861, was intr...
- The importance of icebergs to ocean life
The word iceberg refers to pieces of ice larger than five meters across. The waters surrounding Antarctica are home to most of the icebergs on Earth, although they can also be found in the Arctic region. The water sur...
- An enterprise education programme in Hong Kong
The Teen Entrepreneurs Competition (TEC) is an enterprise education programme developed by the Business Studies Division at the Hong Kong Institute of Education (HKIED) - the major training body for school teachers in...
- Ahead of its time
One October afternoon, a young New Zealander, Sam Tobin, called his dogs and went for a walk down to the nearby Ruamahanga River. Having been very high for days, the river had at last fallen, and Tobin was eager to se...
- The internal body clock
From buffalo to bacteria, oaks to algae, all life follows the same relentless 24-hour cycle, which is driven by the rising and setting of the Sun. Or is it? Over 250 years ago, a French scientist performed a simple ex...
- 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, also the accredited father of the science of...
- The History of the Chicken
Chicken is the universal food of our era, crossing cultural boundaries with ease. With its mild taste and uniform texture, chicken presents a blank canvas for the national flavours of almost any cuisine. However, unti...