Category: Academic Reading Tests
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Cambridge IELTS 9 Academic Reading Test 1
Reading Passage 1 William Henry Perkin The man who invented synthetic dyes William Henry Perkin was born on March 12, 1838, in London, England. As a boy, Perkin’s curiosity prompted early interests in the arts, sciences, photography, and engineering. But it was a chance stumbling upon a run-down, yet functional, laboratory in his late grandfather’s home…
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Cambridge IELTS 8 Academic Reading Test 4
Reading Passage 1 Land of the rising sum A Japan has a significantly better record in terms of average mathematical attainment than England and Wales. Large sample international comparisons of pupils’ attainments since the 1960s have established that not only did Japanese pupils at age 13 have better scores of average attainment, but there was also…
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Cambridge IELTS 8 Academic Reading Test 3
Reading Passage 1 Striking Back at Lightning With Lasers Seldom is the weather more dramatic than when thunderstorms strike. Their electrical fury inflicts death or serious injury on around 500 people each year in the United States alone. As the clouds roll in, a leisurely round of golf can become a terrifying dice with death…
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Cambridge IELTS 8 Academic Reading Test 2
Reading Passage 1 Sheet glass manufacture: the float process Glass, which has been made since the time of the Mesopotamians and Egyptians, is little more than a mixture of sand, soda ash and lime. When heated to about 1500 degrees Celsius (°C) this becomes a molten mass that hardens when slowly cooled. The first successful…
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Cambridge IELTS 8 Academic Reading Test 1
Reading Passage 1 A Chronicle of Timekeeping A. According to archaeological evidence, at least 5, 000 years ago, and long before the advent of the Roman Empire, the Babylonians began to measure time, introducing calendars to coordinate communal activities, to plan the shipment of goods and, in particular, to regulate planting and harvesting. They based…
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Cambridge IELTS 7 Academic Reading Test 4
Reading Passage 1 Pulling Strings to Build Pyramids No one knows exactly how the pyramids were built. Marcus Chown reckons the answer could be ‘hanging in the air’. The pyramids of Egypt were built more than three thousand years ago, and no one knows how. The conventional picture is that tens of thousands of slaves…
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Cambridge IELTS 7 Academic Reading Test 3
Reading Passage 1 Ant Intelligence When we think of intelligent members of the animal kingdom, the creatures that spring immediately to mind are apes and monkeys. But in fact, the social lives of some members of the insect kingdom are sufficiently complex to suggest more than a hint of intelligence. Among these, the world…
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Cambridge IELTS 7 Academic Reading Test 2
Reading Passage 1 Why pagodas don’t fall down In a land swept by typhoons and shaken by earthquakes, how have Japan’s tallest and seemingly flimsiest old buildings – 500 or so wooden pagodas – remained standing for centuries? Records show that only two have collapsed during the past 1400 years. Those that have disappeared were…
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Cambridge IELTS 7 Academic Reading Test 1
Reading Passage 1 Let’s Go Bats A Bats have a problem: how to find their way around in the dark. They hunt at night, and cannot use light to help them find prey and avoid obstacles. You might say that this is a problem of their own making, one that they could avoid simply by…