Quizzes, exams, and flashcards about Academic Reading: Reading 1 — the shipping container, Reading 2 — the urban heat island, Reading 3 — forgetting and…
← IELTS Academic & General Training
Full-length passages of the kind the Academic paper uses, with the questions that decide it — and the vocabulary from each one on flashcards.
Three passages, 2,150 to 2,750 words in total, 40 questions, 60 minutes, and — unlike Listening — no extra time at the end to copy answers across. That works out at 90 seconds a question with the reading included.
The texts come from books, journals, magazines, newspapers and online sources, on subjects a first-year undergraduate would be expected to cope with in any faculty. They are not written for language learners, they are not about your subject, and where a technical term is unavoidable it is glossed. You are never expected to know anything about the topic in advance — every answer is on the page.
IELTS uses eleven question types on this paper: multiple choice, True/False/Not Given, Yes/No/Not Given, matching information, matching headings, matching features, matching sentence endings, sentence completion, summary or table or flow-chart completion, diagram label completion, and short-answer questions.
Six of those eleven types ask you to write a word from the passage into a gap, and one asks you to label a diagram. A multiple-choice quiz cannot set those, and pretending otherwise would be dishonest — practise them on official material, where spelling counts and a plural you did not copy exactly loses the mark.
What is here is the reasoning half: multiple choice, headings, matching, purpose, the writer's view, and the meaning of a word in context. Every question shows you the whole passage, exactly as the paper does — on the real test the text sits beside the questions for the full hour, and the skill is finding your way back into it quickly, not remembering it.
True/False/Not Given is set here the other way round. In the real paper you get one statement and choose between three verdicts. Two questions in one quiz may not offer the same set of options — a learner who recognises the list answers the second from the first — so these materials give you four statements and put the verdict in the question: which one is Not Given, which one contradicts the passage, which one is true. The judgement you have to make is identical. The layout is ours, and you should expect the real thing to look different.
Not Given is not the same as False, and under time pressure they feel the same.
The trap is that the Not Given statement is usually the plausible one — the thing you would guess is true, that any reasonable person would assume, that the topic makes likely. None of that matters. The only question is whether the words are on the page, and what you know about the world is not evidence.
The explanations here always say where the other three statements appear, because on a Not Given question that is the only way to show that the fourth one does not.
Every passage here is written by Zestly. Nothing is reproduced from an IELTS paper or any official practice material.
