Below you will find a number of IELTS Academic Reading practice tests. All of the practice tests have answer keys with explanations and a short vocabulary for each section. Complete a test to see your IELTS Reading band score. Check printable tests if you want to save them in PDF.
Note that these test are for reference only. Using the most up-to-date IELTS textbooks is always a good idea. IELTS British Council website is a good place to start looking for practice materials.
IELTS Reading Practice Test 1
The old, print-friendly test Section 1 Bakelite In 1907, Leo Hendrick Baekeland, a Belgian scientist working in New York, discovered and patented a revolutionary new synthetic material. His invention, which he named 'Bakelite', was of enormous technological importance, and effectively launched the modern plastics industry. The term 'plastic' comes from ...
IELTS Reading Practice Test 2
The old, print-friendly test Section 1 The Impact of Wilderness Tourism A The market for tourism in remote areas is booming as never before. Countries all across the world are actively promoting their 'wilderness' regions - such as mountains, Arctic lands, deserts, small islands and wetlands - to high-spending tourists ...
IELTS Reading Practice Test 3
The old, print-friendly test Section 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 ...
IELTS Reading Practice Test 4
The old, print-friendly test Section 1 Adam's Wine A
Water is the giver and, at the same time, the taker of life. It covers most of the surface of the planet we live on and features large in the development of the human race. On present predictions, it is an ...
Water is the giver and, at the same time, the taker of life. It covers most of the surface of the planet we live on and features large in the development of the human race. On present predictions, it is an ...
IELTS Reading Practice Test 5
The old, print-friendly test Section 1 A
They play hard, they play often, and they play to win. Australian sports teams win more than their fair share of titles, demolishing rivals with seeming ease. How do they do it? A big part of the secret is an extensive and ...
They play hard, they play often, and they play to win. Australian sports teams win more than their fair share of titles, demolishing rivals with seeming ease. How do they do it? A big part of the secret is an extensive and ...
IELTS Reading Practice Test 6
The old, print-friendly test Section 1 Networking as a concept has acquired what is in all truth an unjustified air of modernity. It is considered in the corporate world as an essential tool for the modern businessperson, as they trot round the globe drumming up business for themselves or a ...
IELTS Reading Practice Test 7
The old, print-friendly test Reading Passage 1 You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-13, which are based on Reading Passage 1. The Value of a College Degree Escalating cost of higher education is causing many to question the value of continuing education beyond high school. Many wonder whether the ...
IELTS Reading Practice Test 8
The old, print-friendly test Reading Passage 1 You should spend about 20 minutes on Questions 1-15, which are based on Passage 1 below. Questions 1-5 Reading Passage 1 has five paragraphs, A-E. Choose the most suitable heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below. Write the appropriate numbers (I-VIII) ...
IELTS Reading Practice Test 9
The old, print-friendly test Reading Passage 1 Questions 1-13 The History of Bicycle The bicycle was not invented by one individual or in one country. It took nearly 100 years and many individuals for the modern bicycle to be born. By the end of those 100 years, bicycles had revolutionised ...
IELTS Reading Practice Test 10
The old, print-friendly test Reading Passage 1 Finding the Lost Freedom 1. The private car is assumed to have widened our horizons and increased our mobility. When we consider our children’s mobility, they can be driven to more places (and more distant places) than they could visit without access to ...
IELTS Reading Practice Test 11
The old, print-friendly test Reading Passage 1 Its raining cats and ... Since ancient times, people have marvelled at the fact that cats always manage to land on all four paws, no matter what height they fall from. It took scientists a considerable amount of research to explain this phenomenon ...
IELTS Reading Practice Test 12
The old, print-friendly test Reading Passage 1 Synaesthesia A Imagine a page with a square box in the middle. The box is lined with rows of the number 5, repeated over and over. All of the 5s are identical in size, font and colour, and equally distributed across the box ...
IELTS Reading Practice Test 13
The old, print-friendly test Reading Passage 1 A Recent years have seen a barrage of dystopian Young Adult novels grow in popularity almost overnigh t- from The Hunger Games to The Maze Runner, Divergent, and The Knife of Never Letting Go. These novels, set in postapocalyptic, totalitarian or otherwise ruthless ...
IELTS Reading Practice Test 14
The old, print-friendly test Reading Passage 1 A Brief History of London Underground It is a staple of not just the capital of the UK, but of British culture in general. It is used by more than 1.3 billion people per year, and it is more than 400 kilometres long ...
IELTS Reading Practice Test 16
The old, print-friendly test Reading Passage 1 It is in everyone’s pocket and we feel ill-at-ease when it is not. The ubiquitous mobile phone. The world of technology has come a long way since the first mobile phone was invented in 1973. Bulky and awkward to use at first to ...
IELTS Reading Practice Test 17
The old, print-friendly test Haiku Haiku is a traditional form of Japanese poetry that typically consists of three lines and is used as a means of expressing emotions and capturing moments of life in a brief and impactful way. Haiku has a concise and minimalist format of verse that often ...
IELTS Reading Practice Test 18
The old, print-friendly test Running water Does your house have a supply of water? What happens when you open the tap – does it hiss at you angrily or obediently provides you with the treasured liquid? If the latter is the case, then consider yourself lucky, because according to a ...
IELTS Reading Practice Test 19
The old, print-friendly test Pugilism A Pugilism, a word rarely used today, is another term for boxing, a combat sport and a martial art in which two people throw punches at each other for a predetermined amount of time in a boxing ring. The term pugilism comes from the Latin ...
Hello, I’m teaching IELTS for the first time and I’m struggling with some of the logic regarding the answers. For example, on Practice Test 10, the answer to Question 24 is ‘Not Given’ because they can’t be sure, but the answer to Question 28 is ‘False’, even though in the final two sentences of Paragraph 8 they are essentially saying they can’t be sure what will happen. I don’t understand how these are different?
Is there also a typo in the answer to Question 2 (‘True’), as Paragraph 1 of that text details how children ‘have lost much of their freedom to explore’?
Any help you can give, I’d be very grateful 🙂 Thanks!
Hello, Julie! IELTS True/False/Not Given questions have always been a matter of controversy, particularly the fine line between False and Not Given. Unfortunately, we can’t always get it right, but let’s take a closer look at the questions here.
Question 24 – if we use the general rule of questions and answers following a certain order, then the information regarding this question should be somewhere in Paragraph 4. There, in the middle it introduces an idea: “Does it [the heat from the atmosphere] just “diffuse” from the warmer air vertically into the water, and heat only the surface layer of the sea?”. Last sentence of this paragraph goes: “measurements have shown that the rate of heat transfer into the ocean by vertical diffusion is far lower in practice than the figures that many models have adopted.” Therefore, it does not give us a conclusive answer – neither ‘True’ nor ‘False’ would work here.
Question 28 is much simpler and the answer in fact should be TRUE. The key is in the sentence that goes “It is now believed that these inequalities cannot persist, as winds will act to continuously spread out the water expansion.” in other words, the according to the sentence the current idea is that the uneven state of ocean rise is unlikely to continue – in other words, the rise of ocean levels is expect to be even. I have looked up the answers in other sources, and they vary wildly, which is a bit surprising to say the least.
Regarding Question 2 – you are absolutely correct! We have fixed that one.
Thank you very much for your detailed response, it’s very helpful 🙂
Where are the IELTS reading general training ?
Hey Livio, we are not currently offering any IELTS General Reading practice tests, we might do that in the future though!
Thank you very much for your sample tests. They are very helpful. Could you clarify whether there will be any more upcoming IELTS academic reading tests on your website?
Hello, are there going to be any more reading tests? I’ve done all of them and they seem to be quite helpful.
Hey Stepan, hope this finds you well.
Currently I am the only person who keeps engexam.info running. I’ve been working on AI integration over the past few months, so that kept me busy and I was unable to add any more practice tests. I hope to get back to adding practice tests this summer, but there is no definite timeline for that.
Thanks for your understanding!