Category: Academic Reading Tests
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Cambridge IELTS 5 Academic Reading Test 1
Reading Passage 1 Johnson’s Dictionary For the century before Johnson’s Dictionary was published in 1775, there had been concern about the state of the English language. There was no standard way of speaking or writing and no agreement as to the best way of bringing some order to the chaos of English spelling. Dr Johnson…
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Cambridge IELTS 5 Academic Reading Test 3
Reading Passage 1 Early Childhood Education A ‘Education To Be More’ was published last August. It was the report of the New Zealand Government’s Early Childhood Care and Education Working Group. The report argued for enhanced equity of access and better funding for childcare and early childhood education institutions. Unquestionably, that’s a real need; but…
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Cambridge IELTS 1 Academic Reading Test 4
Reading Passage 1 GLASS – Capturing The Dance of Light A Glass, in one form or another, has long been in noble service to humans. As one of the most widely used of manufactured materials, and certainly the most versatile, it can be as imposing as a telescope mirror the width of a tennis court…
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Cambridge IELTS 1 Academic Reading Test 3
Reading Passage 1 Spoken Corpus Comes To Life A The compiling of dictionaries has been historically the provenance of studious professorial types – usually bespectacled – who love to pore over weighty tomes and make pronouncements on the finer nuances of meaning. They were probably good at crosswords and definitely knew a lot of words,…
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Cambridge IELTS 4 Academic Reading Test 1
Reading passage 1 Adults and children are frequently confronted with statements about the alarming rate of loss of tropical rainforests. For example, one graphic illustration to which children might readily relate is the estimate that rainforests are being destroyed at a rate equivalent to one thousand football fields every forty minutes – about the duration…
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Cambridge IELTS 1 Academic Reading Test 2
Reading Passage 1 Right and left-handedness in humans Why do humans, virtually alone among all animal species, display a distinct left or right-handedness? Not even our closest relatives among the apes possess such decided lateral asymmetry, as psychologists call it. Yet about 90 per cent of every human population that has ever lived appears to…
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Cambridge IELTS 1 Academic Reading Test 1
Reading Passage 1 A Spark, A Flint; How Fire Leapt To Life The control of fire was the first and perhaps greatest of humanity’s steps towards a life-enhancing technology. To early man, fire was a divine gift randomly delivered in the form of lightning, forest fire or burning lava. Unable to make flame for themselves,…
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Cambridge IELTS 2 Academic Reading Test 4
Reading Passage 1 Green Wave Washes Over Mainstream Shopping Research in Britain has shown that ‘green consumers’ continue to flourish as a significant group amongst shoppers. This suggests that politicians who claim environmentalism is yesterday’s issue may be seriously misjudging the public mood. A report from Mintel, the market research organisation, says that despite recession…
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Cambridge IELTS 2 Academic Reading Test 3
Reading Passage 1 Absenteeism In Nursing: A Longitudinal Study Absence from work is a costly and disruptive problem for any organisation. The cost of absenteeism in Australia has been put at 1.8 million hours per day or $1400 million annually. The study reported here was conducted in the Prince William Hospital in Brisbane, Australia, where,…
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Cambridge IELTS 2 Academic Reading Test 2
Reading Passage 1 Implementing The Cycle Of Success: A Case Study Within Australia, Australian Hotels Inc (AHI) operates nine hotels and employs over 2000 permanent full-time staff, 300 permanent part-time employees and 100 casual staff. One of its latest ventures, the Sydney Airport hotel (SAH), opened in March 1995. The hotel is the closest to…
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Cambridge IELTS 2 Academic Reading Test 1
Reading Passage 1 Airports on Water River deltas are difficult places for map makers. The river builds them up, the sea wears them down; their outlines are always changing. The changes in China’s Pearl River delta, however, are more dramatic than these natural fluctuations. An island six kilometres long and with a total area of…
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Cambridge IELTS 3 Academic Reading Test 4
Reading Passage One Part OneA Air pollution is increasingly becoming the focus of government and citizen concern around the globe. From Mexico City and New York, to Singapore and Tokyo, new solutions to this old problem are being proposed, Mailed and implemented with ever increasing speed. It is feared that unless pollution reduction measures are…