By the end of this test, you can see how you manage three academic passages and 40 questions in the time allowed, and which question types still cost you marks.
Free full IELTS Academic Reading practice test: three original passages, 40 questions, an optional 60-minute timer, marking at the end and an estimated band. No sign-up.
This practice test has the same format as the IELTS Academic Reading test: three passages, 40 questions and 60 minutes, with 2,150–2,750 words of text in all and 1 mark for each question. The passages and questions are original, and they use the question types practised in the other IELTS exercises on this site: True/False/Not Given, Matching Information, Matching Headings, sentence completion and summary completion.
How it is marked: as in the exam, there are no Check buttons. You can leave a question blank and come back to it. All 40 questions are marked once, when you finish, and you then see an explanation for every answer you got wrong and an estimated band based on the figures ielts.org publishes. This is a practice test, not an official IELTS test.
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You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1–13, which are based on Reading Passage 1 below.
In the exam you have 60 minutes for all three passages. Start the timer if you want to practise under exam conditions. It never locks the test: when time is up, it just tells you.
How a wooden machine without pedals became the bicycle we ride today
A The bicycle is so familiar that it is easy to assume its design was obvious from the start. In fact, it took most of the nineteenth century, and a long series of experiments, before the machine settled into its modern form. Its history is less a story of one brilliant invention than of many small corrections, each solving a problem created by the design before it. Some of the most important features of today’s bicycle, such as the chain that drives the back wheel and the air-filled tyre, were added only after earlier machines had shown, sometimes painfully, what did not work. Several of these ideas were even invented, forgotten and then invented again.
B The story usually begins in the German city of Mannheim in 1817. Karl Drais, a civil servant with a talent for invention, built a two-wheeled wooden machine that the rider sat on and pushed along the ground with his feet. There were no pedals. On 12 June that year, Drais is reported to have ridden it to a coaching inn about seven kilometres away and back in a little over an hour, considerably faster than walking. His running machine briefly became fashionable, and copies appeared in several European countries, but the craze soon faded. The machines were heavy and expensive, and riders who used them on crowded pavements were soon regarded as a danger to people on foot.
C Pedals arrived decades later, fixed directly to the front wheel, and they created a new problem. Because each turn of the pedals produced exactly one turn of the wheel, the only way to travel further with every turn was to make the wheel bigger. By the 1870s, this logic had produced the high-wheeler, later nicknamed the penny-farthing, whose front wheel could be almost as tall as its rider. It was fast on a good road, but the rider sat high above the front wheel, and a stone or a sudden stop could throw him forward over the handlebars. Such falls were common enough to have their own name: “taking a header”. Racing and touring on high-wheelers became popular among young men who could afford them, but most people, including most women, regarded the machine as far too dangerous to ride.
D The solution came from England. In 1885, John Kemp Starley of Coventry began selling a machine he called the Rover. Its two wheels were of similar size, and the rider sat between them, pedalling a chain that drove the back wheel. Because the chain ran from a large toothed wheel at the pedals to a much smaller one at the back, a wheel of ordinary size could now travel as far with each turn of the pedals as a giant one had. The design became known as the “safety bicycle”, and the name explained its appeal: the rider sat close to the ground and could put a foot down at any time. Within a few years the high-wheeler was disappearing from the roads, and the basic shape of the modern bicycle had been fixed.
E One important problem remained: comfort. Solid rubber tyres passed every bump in the road straight to the rider. In 1888, John Boyd Dunlop, a Scottish vet working in Belfast, fitted air-filled tubes to the wheels of his son’s tricycle, and the improvement was so obvious that racing cyclists soon adopted the idea. Dunlop was not, in fact, the first. Another Scot, Robert William Thomson, had patented an air-filled tyre in 1845, but his invention was never developed for everyday use and was largely forgotten. Dunlop’s timing was simply better: the safety bicycle had created a mass market that was ready for his tyre.
F The effects of the safety bicycle went far beyond transport. In the 1890s, cycling became a craze in Europe and North America, and for many women it offered a new kind of independence: the chance to travel alone, without a horse, a carriage or a chaperone. In an interview in 1896, the American campaigner Susan B. Anthony said that cycling had done more to free women than anything else. Historians are more cautious, pointing out that many social and political changes were already under way. Still, the arguments of the period about women’s clothing, and the many cycling clubs that were founded, suggest that the machine changed how people thought about distance, freedom and who was allowed to travel.
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the reading passage? Choose
The reading passage has six paragraphs, A–F. Which paragraph contains the following information? Choose the correct letter, A–F.
Complete the summary below. Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Starley’s Rover was given the name 11 because its rider sat low and could reach the ground easily. A few years later, cycling became more comfortable when air-filled tyres replaced 12 ones, although a similar tyre had been patented decades earlier. During the cycling boom of the 1890s, many women valued the bicycle because they could now travel alone, without a 13 to supervise them.
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 14–26, which are based on Reading Passage 2 below.
How honeybees tell each other where to find food, and how scientists learned to read the message
A A honeybee colony depends on finding food quickly. In summer, flowers that are full of nectar one week may be empty the next, so a colony has to send its foragers wherever food is most plentiful at that moment. A single bee cannot search the whole countryside, and a colony that relied on each forager finding food by chance would waste a great deal of time and energy. Instead, it relies on information that is shared inside the hive. When a forager returns from a rich source, she does not simply unload her nectar. She often performs a series of movements on the vertical surface of the honeycomb that other bees follow closely, and those movements carry a message about where the food can be found.
B The meaning of these movements was worked out in the middle of the twentieth century by the Austrian zoologist Karl von Frisch. He noticed that in the most informative movement, now known as the waggle run, the bee moves forward in a straight line while shaking her body from side to side, then circles back and repeats the run, sometimes many times. Von Frisch showed that the angle of the run, measured against straight up on the comb, matched the angle between the food and the sun outside. The length of each waggle run, meanwhile, increased with the distance to the food. In effect, the dance turned a direction and a distance into a pattern of movement that other bees could learn.
C The discovery was all the more remarkable because the dance takes place in near darkness. Inside the hive, other bees cannot watch the dancer in the usual sense. Instead, they stay close to her, sensing her movements through contact and through the air currents and vibrations that she produces. The system also has to cope with time. Because the sun moves across the sky during the day, a direction given in the morning would be wrong by the afternoon unless it was corrected. Von Frisch found that dancing bees do adjust the angle of their runs as the day goes on, so that the message stays accurate even when the dancer has spent a long time inside the hive.
D Von Frisch’s work later earned him a share of the 1973 Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine, but by then it had already been seriously challenged. In 1967, the American biologist Adrian Wenner and his colleagues argued that bees did not need the dance at all. Recruits, they claimed, found food by smell, using the scent of the flowers clinging to the dancer’s body together with odours along the route. They also pointed out that recruits often took far longer to reach the food than a direct flight would require, which seemed hard to explain if they were following precise directions. The dispute was not only about bees. Wenner argued that the idea of an animal language had been accepted too quickly, and that far more careful experiments were needed before scientists could claim that insects exchanged abstract information.
E Settling the question required experiments in which the dance and the smell could be separated. One approach used a robot bee, a small model moved by machinery, which performed waggle runs on the comb. Bees that followed its dances searched mainly in the direction it indicated. Some of the clearest evidence came in 2005, when a team of British and German researchers fitted recruit bees with tiny radar transponders and tracked their flights. Most recruits flew more or less straight towards the area the dance had indicated and then searched there. When the researchers moved recruits to a new starting point before releasing them, the bees flew in the direction the dance had given, not towards the food itself.
F Today, few researchers doubt that the dance carries real information, but the picture has become more complicated, not less. Studies suggest that recruits combine the dance with other cues, including scent, and that experienced foragers sometimes ignore dances entirely and return to places they already know. Some researchers have also asked how much colonies actually gain from dancing, and the answer appears to depend on the landscape: the information seems to be most valuable where good food is scattered and hard to find. The dance, in other words, is not the whole of honeybee communication, but one important tool within it.
The reading passage has six paragraphs, A–F. Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.
Complete the sentences below. Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Do the following statements agree with the information given in the reading passage? Choose
You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 27–40, which are based on Reading Passage 3 below.
What a nineteenth-century experiment on nonsense syllables still tells us about learning
A In the late nineteenth century, the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus set out to measure something that most people assumed could not be measured: how quickly we forget. Earlier thinkers had written about memory, but mainly through reflection and anecdote. Ebbinghaus wanted numbers. To keep his results free of meaning and personal association, he invented thousands of nonsense syllables, short strings of letters that formed no real word, and learned lists of them by heart. He was both the experimenter and the only participant, and he tested himself with a discipline that few later researchers have matched. His findings, published in 1885 in a short book titled Über das Gedächtnis (On Memory), became one of the founding texts of experimental psychology.
B His method was ingenious. Rather than simply asking how much of a list he could recall, Ebbinghaus measured how long it took him to relearn it. If a list that had first required twenty minutes of practice could be relearned in ten, he had “saved” half of the original effort. This measure, known as savings, revealed traces of earlier learning that a simple test of recall would miss: even when he could not produce a single syllable from a list, relearning it was faster than learning it from scratch. Plotting his savings against time produced the result for which he is best known, the forgetting curve. It falls steeply in the first hours after learning and then levels off, so that what survives the first day or two tends to be retained for much longer.
C Because the original study had a single participant, it is reasonable to ask whether the curve describes anyone except Ebbinghaus himself. In 2015, the Dutch researchers Jaap Murre and Joeri Dros published an attempt to repeat the experiment as closely as possible. One participant spent about seventy hours learning and relearning lists of nonsense syllables, at delays ranging from twenty minutes to thirty-one days. The resulting curve closely matched the one published 130 years earlier. It also contained a small surprise: savings were slightly higher at twenty-four hours than at some shorter delays. This jump may reflect the effect of a night’s sleep, although the study was not designed to test that idea.
D Ebbinghaus also noticed that the way practice is arranged matters, not only how much practice there is. Spreading repetitions out over several days produced better retention than packing the same number into a single session. This pattern, now called the spacing effect, has been confirmed many times since. A large review published in 2006, which combined the results of hundreds of experiments, found that spaced practice reliably improved long-term retention compared with practice crowded into one session, although the best gap between sessions depended on how long the material needed to be remembered. Cramming the night before an exam may get a student through the exam itself, but it is a poor way to remember anything afterwards.
E A second technique, retrieval practice, works in a less obvious way. In a well-known study published in 2006, the American psychologists Henry Roediger and Jeffrey Karpicke asked students to read short prose passages and then either study them again or take a test in which they wrote down as much as they could remember. On a test given five minutes later, the students who had restudied performed better. On tests two days and one week later, however, the result was reversed: those who had practised recalling the passages remembered substantially more. In a related experiment, students who had only restudied predicted that they would remember more than those who had been tested, which suggests that our sense of having learned something is not always a reliable guide.
F Not everyone is convinced that these laboratory findings transfer easily to the classroom. Critics point out that many studies use short texts and simple tests, while real learning involves complex ideas that must be understood, not merely recalled. Others note that spaced practice and retrieval practice feel harder than rereading, so students may resist them even when they work. Some teachers also worry that frequent testing could make pupils anxious, although research on short quizzes that do not count towards grades has generally been more reassuring. The psychologist Robert Bjork has described techniques of this kind as “desirable difficulties”: the very effort that makes them unpleasant may be what makes them effective. Whether schools can build that effort into everyday teaching remains an open question, but the shape of Ebbinghaus’s curve suggests that the cost of ignoring it is high.
The reading passage has six paragraphs, A–F. Which paragraph contains the following information? Choose the correct letter, A–F.
Complete the summary using the list of words, A–J, below.
A arrangement B retention C confirmed D obvious E tested F confident G difficulty H doubted I effective J speed
Ebbinghaus found that the 31 of practice sessions affected memory: repetitions spread over several days led to better 32 than the same amount of practice in one session. Many later studies have 33 that spacing works, although the ideal interval varies. Retrieval practice works in a less 34 way. In one study, students who reread a text did better on an immediate test, but those who had 35 themselves remembered more a week later, despite feeling less 36 about it.
Complete the sentences below. Write NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS AND/OR A NUMBER from the passage for each answer.
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