Reading 4 — the four-day week
A full-length Academic Reading passage of a kind the first three do not give you: an argument. Seven lettered paragraphs, just over 700 words, in which a writer weighs the evidence from four-day-week trials and says, in the first person, what it can and cannot prove. Thirteen questions, and the passage's vocabulary on flashcards.
An argumentative passage is where the paper sets Yes/No/Not Given rather than True/False/Not Given. The difference matters: True/False/Not Given asks whether a statement matches the facts reported, Yes/No/Not Given whether it matches what the writer thinks. Here the two are deliberately close together. The writer reports what campaigners claim, reports what the trials found, and then gives a verdict on both — and a statement that repeats a campaigner's claim is not automatically a view the writer holds.
One question gives you the verdict to choose, exactly as the paper does: a single statement, and Yes, No or Not Given. Three more put four statements in front of you and ask which one agrees with the writer, which one the writer rejects, and on which one the writer says nothing at all. The Not Given statement is the likely-sounding one — that working from home makes a shorter week easier — and it is not on the page. The explanations say where each of the other statements is dealt with, because that is the only way to show that the fourth one is absent.
Two questions ask you to choose TWO answers from five, as the paper often does. Both are built on the trap that decides these items: an option that sounds like the passage but changes one word — "every" where the passage says "many", "abandoned" where it says "kept".
The rest are the reasoning types the paper returns to: two matching headings in which the wrong options are fair summaries of other paragraphs, detail, the purpose of a paragraph, an idiom explained by the phrase it is set against, and the writer's overall position, which is narrower than either side of the debate would like.
The questions that ask you to copy words from the passage into gaps cannot be set as a quiz; practise those on published test material, where spelling counts. On the real paper the passage sits beside the questions for the whole hour; here each question repeats it, so the skill is the same — going back into the text quickly. Allow yourself twenty minutes.
Written by Zestly. No IELTS material is reproduced, and nothing here is endorsed by the test's owners.
- Tell Yes/No/Not Given (the writer's views) from True/False/Not Given (the facts reported)
- Separate a claim the writer reports from a view the writer holds
- Recognise a view the writer never gives, however likely it sounds
- Choose TWO answers when each distractor changes one word of the passage
- Follow an argument that ends narrower than either side of a debate
Practice material written by Zestly, based on the ielts.org description of Academic Reading question types.
Sample question
Reading Passage — The four-day week and what the trials can prove A Few workplace ideas have travelled as quickly in recent years as the four-day week. Its promise is simple enough to fit on a placard: the same pay, one day fewer, and no loss of output. Campaigners point to trials in which firms reported that staff were less exhausted, took fewer sick days and were less likely to resign, and they conclude that the five-day week survives out of habit rather than necessity. I think the trials deserve to be taken seriously. I also think they have been asked to prove more than they can. B Consider first who took part. In the best-known British trial, in 2022, around sixty organisations volunteered, and most of them kept some version of the arrangement once it had ended. That is a striking result, but a firm that volunteers for such an experiment is not a random firm. It is usually small, often in marketing, professional services or the charity sector, and it is run by people who already believe that time spent at a desk is a poor measure of what gets done. Such firms were the places where the idea was most likely to work, and the results tell us that it worked there. C A second difficulty lies in what was measured. Wellbeing was assessed largely through questionnaires completed by the employees themselves, who knew that their answers might influence whether the extra day off continued. That does not make their answers false, but it makes them an unusual kind of evidence. Productivity, meanwhile, was reported by the firms, in whatever terms each firm chose. A design agency can count completed projects; a hospital ward cannot count its patients as output and hope to have measured the same thing. D This is where the argument usually goes wrong, in my view. The case for a shorter week rests on the claim that much of the working day is wasted — on meetings that decide nothing, on messages that did not need sending — and that the waste can be squeezed out if people are given a reason to squeeze it. For work whose output is a finished document, that is plausible. For work whose output is presence — a nurse on a ward, a teacher in front of a class, a driver on a route — there is nothing to squeeze. A ward is not staffed more efficiently because its nurses are rested; it is either staffed or it is not. Cover the fifth day and someone must be paid to be there; fail to cover it and the service shrinks. E None of this means the idea should be abandoned. Iceland's public-sector trials, which began in 2015, are often cited as evidence for the four-day week, but what most participants actually gained was a shorter week — thirty-five or thirty-six hours instead of forty — and many kept all five days. That arrangement, spread across offices, playschools and hospitals rather than a few enthusiastic firms, seems to me a more instructive result than any headline about a free Friday, because it shows hours being reduced in services that could not simply close for a day. F There is also a question of who benefits. A compressed week, in which the same forty hours are fitted into four longer days, is sometimes offered as a cheaper alternative. It is not the same policy. Ten-hour days suit people without children to collect or relatives to care for, and they may leave the others worse off than before. A reform presented as a gift to all workers can, depending on its design, quietly favour those who needed it least. G The sensible conclusion is narrower than either side would like. Both camps can find support in the same set of results, which is usually a sign that the results are being asked the wrong question. For some kinds of work, a shorter week appears to cost employers little and to give employees a great deal, and firms in those sectors have good reason to try it. For others, it is a decision about paying for more staff, and it should be argued for honestly on those terms — as a choice a society may wish to make, not as a free lunch that the data have already served. — Which heading best fits Paragraph C?
- Doubts about the evidence that was collected
- Why the volunteers were not typical
- A trial that cut hours rather than days
- Longer days are not a neutral change
See the answer
Doubts about the evidence that was collected
Paragraph C is about what was measured and how: wellbeing through the employees' own questionnaires, productivity "in whatever terms each firm chose". The heading about untypical volunteers summarises Paragraph B, the trial that cut hours rather than days is Iceland in Paragraph E, and longer days not being neutral is Paragraph F — true headings, wrong paragraphs.