Reading 2026-10 Test 10 — IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test with Answers

About this set: compiled and lightly cleaned up from real test material that test-takers recalled. IELTS draws from a global question pool, so this material circulates worldwide. To give you a complete, sittable test, material reported around the same period is assembled together — so a set may combine content from several exam dates, not one single sitting. Any audio is a recreation for practice. Organized for study convenience. Based on test-taker recalls — not official IELTS material.

Reading Passage 1: Listening to the Ocean

The oceans cover more than 70 per cent of the planet's surface, yet until quite recently we knew less about their depths than about the surface of the Moon. The Moon has been far more accessible to study because astronomers have long been able to look at its surface, first with the naked eye and then with the telescope, both instruments that focus light. Until the twentieth century, however, no instruments were available for the study of Earth's oceans: light, which can travel trillions of kilometres through the vast vacuum of space, cannot penetrate very far in seawater.

It turns out that for penetrating water the best instrument is sound. Curious investigators have long been fascinated by sound and the way it travels in water. As early as 1490, the artist and scientist Leonardo da Vinci observed: 'If you cause your ship to stop and place the head of a long tube in the water and place the outer extremity to your ear, you will hear ships at a great distance from you.' It was not until 1826 that two scientists, Colladon and Sturm, accurately measured the speed of sound in water. Using a long tube to listen under water (as da Vinci had suggested), they recorded how fast the sound of a submerged bell travelled across Lake Geneva in Switzerland. What these investigators demonstrated was that water is an excellent medium for sound, transmitting it almost five times faster than its speed in air.

A number of factors influence how far sound travels under water and how long it lasts, including particles, salinity, temperature and pressure. Particles in seawater can reflect, scatter and absorb certain frequencies of sound, just as certain wavelengths of light may be reflected, scattered and absorbed by specific types of particles in the atmosphere. In 1943, Maurice Ewing and J. L. Worzel conducted an experiment to test the theory that low-frequency waves, which are less vulnerable than higher frequencies to scattering and absorption, should be able to travel great distances, if the sound source is placed correctly. The researchers set off an underwater explosion and learned that it was detected easily by receivers 3,200 kilometres away. In analysing the results of this test, they discovered a kind of 'sound pipeline', known as the 'deep sound channel'. Sound introduced into this channel of water could travel thousands of kilometres with minimal loss of signal.

The US Navy was quick to appreciate the usefulness of low-frequency sound and the deep sound channel. They developed the Sound Surveillance System (SOSUS), which involved underwater microphones, called hydrophones, that were placed on the ocean bottom and connected by cables to on-shore processing centres. It was Christopher Clark of Cornell University who soon realised that SOSUS could be used to listen to whales. Using a SOSUS receiver in the West Indies, he could hear whales that were 1,770 kilometres away.

Whales are the biggest of Earth's creatures, yet these animals are also remarkably elusive. Scientists wishing to observe blue whales must simply wait in their ships for the whales to surface. A few whales have been tracked briefly in the wild in this way but not for very great distances, and much about them remains unknown. But by using SOSUS, scientists can track the whales and position them on a map. Moreover, they can track not just one whale at a time, but many creatures simultaneously. They can also learn to distinguish whale calls; researchers have detected changes in the calls of finback whales as the seasons change, and have found that blue whales in different regions of the Pacific Ocean have different calls.

SOSUS has also proved instrumental in obtaining information crucial to our understanding of climate. The system has enabled researchers to begin making ocean temperature measurements on a global scale, measurements that are key to understanding the workings of heat transfer between the ocean and the atmosphere. The ocean plays an enormous role in determining air temperature — the heat capacity in only the upper few metres of ocean is thought to be equal to all of the heat in the entire atmosphere. For sound waves travelling horizontally in the ocean, speed is largely a function of temperature. Thus, the travel time of a wave of sound between two points is a sensitive indicator of the average temperature along its path. Transmitting sound in numerous directions through the deep sound channel can give scientists measurements spanning vast areas of the globe. Thousands of sound paths in the ocean can be pieced together into a map of global ocean temperatures, and by repeating measurements along the same paths over time, scientists can track changes in temperature over months or years.

Researchers are also using other acoustic techniques to monitor climate. Oceanographer Jeff Nystuen, for example, has explored the use of sound to measure rainfall over the ocean. Monitoring changing global rainfall patterns will contribute to understanding major climate change as well as the weather phenomenon known as El Niño. Since 1985, Nystuen has used hydrophones to listen to rain over the ocean, acoustically measuring not only the rainfall rate but also the rainfall type, ranging from drizzle to thunderstorms. By using the sound of rain under water as a 'natural' rain gauge, the measurement of rainfall over the oceans will become available to climatologists. In this way, modern society continues to benefit from the investigations of those who, like Leonardo da Vinci, pursued the answers to some basic questions of nature.

Questions 1–4

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?

In boxes 1–4 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information

FALSE if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

1
In the past, it was easier for scientists to study the Moon than the oceans.
- A. TRUE
- B. FALSE
- C. NOT GIVEN
2
Techniques for investigating the Moon are the same as techniques for researching the ocean.
3
Measuring temperature changes in the ocean using sound is more time-consuming than other methods.
4
Hydrophones can distinguish different kinds of rain.

Questions 5–8

Reading Passage 1 has seven paragraphs, A–G.

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A–G, in boxes 5–8 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

5
examples of things that affect the distance sound can travel in water
6
details of the connection between ocean temperatures and climate
7
details of ways in which light and sound are similar
8
a reference to a long-term study of different types of weather

Questions 9–13

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

Write the correct letter in boxes 9–13 on your answer sheet.

9
According to the passage, who conducted research into the rate at which sound travels in water?
- A. Leonardo da Vinci
- B. Colladon and Sturm
- C. Ewing and Worzel
- D. Jeff Nystuen
10
According to the passage, who conducted research into the distances certain types of sound waves travel in water?
- A. Leonardo da Vinci
- B. Colladon and Sturm
- C. Ewing and Worzel
- D. Christopher Clark
11
SOSUS allows whale researchers to
- A. follow a number of whales at the same time.
- B. protect whales as they migrate.
- C. imitate whale calls of different species.
- D. change the whales' direction of travel.
12
Finback whale calls change
- A. when scientists track them.
- B. at different times of year.
- C. when whales communicate with other species.
- D. when whales come to the surface.
13
SOSUS allows scientists to
- A. make accurate maps of the ocean floor.
- B. measure water-level changes.
- C. investigate ocean currents.
- D. measure variations in temperature.

Reading Passage 2: Follow Your Nose

(A) Aromatherapy is the most widely used complementary therapy in the National Health Service, and doctors use it most often for treating dementia. For elderly patients who have difficulty interacting verbally, and to whom conventional medicine has little to offer, aromatherapy can bring benefits in terms of better sleep, improved motivation, and less disturbed behaviour. So the thinking goes. But last year, a systematic review of health care databases found almost no evidence that aromatherapy is effective in the treatment of dementia. Other findings suggest that aromatherapy works only if you believe it will. In fact, the only research that has unequivocally shown it to have an effect has been carried out on animals.

(B) Behavioural studies have consistently shown that odours elicit emotional memories far more readily than other sensory cues. And earlier this year, Rachel Herz, of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and colleagues peered into people’s heads using functional Magnetic Resonance Imaging (fMRI) to corroborate that. They scanned the brains of five women while they either looked at a photo of a bottle of perfume that evoked a pleasant memory for them, or smelled that perfume. One woman, for instance, remembered how as a child living in Paris she would watch with excitement as her mother dressed to go out and sprayed herself with that perfume. The women themselves described the perfume as far more evocative than the photo, and Herz and co-workers found that the scent did indeed activate the amygdala and other brain regions associated with emotion processing far more strongly than the photograph. But the interesting thing was that the memory itself was no better recalled by the odour than by the picture. "People don’t remember any more detail or with any more clarity when the memory is recalled with an odour," she says. "However, with the odour, you have this intense emotional feeling that’s really visceral."

(C) That’s hardly surprising, Herz thinks, given how the brain has evolved. "The way I like to think about it is that emotion and olfaction are essentially the same things," she says. "The part of the brain that controls emotion literally grew out of the part of the brain that controls smell." That, she says, probably explains why memories for odours that are associated with intense emotions are so strongly entrenched in us, because the smell was initially a survival skill: a signal to approach or to avoid.

(D) Eric Vermetten, a psychiatrist at the University of Utrecht in the Netherlands, says that doctors have long known about the potential of smells to act as traumatic reminders, but the evidence has been largely anecdotal. Last year, he and others set out to document it by describing three cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in which patients reported either that a certain smell triggered their flashbacks, or that smell was a feature of the flashback itself. The researchers concluded that odours could be made use of in exposure therapy, or for reconditioning patients’ fear responses.

(E) After Vermetten presented his findings at a conference, doctors in the audience told him how they had turned this association around and put it to good use. PTSD patients often undergo group therapy, but the therapy itself can expose them to traumatic reminders. "Some clinicians put a strip of vanilla or a strong, pleasant, everyday odorant such as coffee under their patients’ noses, so that they have this continuous olfactory stimulation," says Vermetten. So armed, the patients seem to be better protected against flashbacks. It’s purely anecdotal, and nobody knows what’s happening in the brain, says Vermetten, but it’s possible that the neural pathways by which the odour elicits the pleasant, everyday memory override the fear-conditioned neural pathways that respond to verbal cues.

(F) According to Herz, the therapeutic potential of odours could lie in their very unreliability. She has shown with her perfume-bottle experiment that they don’t guarantee any better recall, even if the memories they elicit feel more real. And there’s plenty of research to show that our noses can be tricked, because being predominantly visual and verbal creatures, we put more faith in those other modalities. In 2001, for instance, Gil Morrot, of the National Institute for Agronomic Research in Montpellier, tricked 54 oenology students by secretly colouring a white wine with an odourless red dye just before they were asked to describe the odours of a range of red and white wines. The students described the coloured wine using terms typically reserved for red wines. What’s more, just like experts, they used terms alluding to the wine’s redness and darkness--visual rather than olfactory qualities. Smell, the researchers concluded, cannot be separated from the other senses.

(G) Last July, Jay Gottfried and Ray Dolan of the Wellcome Department of Imaging Neuroscience in London took that research a step further when they tested people’s response times in naming an odour, either when presented with an image that was associated with the odour or one that was not. So, they asked them to sniff vanilla and simultaneously showed them either a picture of ice cream or of cheese, while scanning their brains in a fMRI machine. People named the smells faster when the picture showed something semantically related to them, and when that happened, a structure called the hippocampus was strongly activated. The researchers’ interpretation was that the hippocampus plays a role in integrating information from the senses--information that the brain then uses to decide what it is perceiving.

Questions 14–18

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs A, C, D, E and G from the list of headings below.

Write the correct number, i–ix, in boxes 14–18 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings

i Remembering the past more clearly

ii Bringing back painful memories

iii Originally an alarm signal

iv The physical effects of scent versus image

v Checking unreliable evidence

vi Reinforcing one sense with another

vii Protection against reliving the past

viii The overriding power of sight and sound

ix Conflicting views

14
Paragraph A
15
Paragraph C
16
Paragraph D
17
Paragraph E
18
Paragraph G

Questions 19–24

Match each finding with the correct researcher, A–D.

Write the correct letter, A–D, in boxes 19–24 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

List of Researchers

A Rachel Herz

B Eric Vermetten

C Gil Morrot

D Jay Gottfried and Ray Dolan

19
Smell can trigger images of horrible events.
20
Odours do not improve the accuracy or detail of remembered events.
21
People identify smells more quickly when visual information is semantically connected.
22
Continuous pleasant odours may help reduce the risk of flashbacks.
23
Smell cannot be considered independently of other sensory input.
24
Emotion-related brain areas respond more strongly to scent than to images.

Questions 25–26

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

Write the correct letter in boxes 25–26 on your answer sheet.

25
In the article, what is the opinion about the conventional method of aromatherapy?
- A. Aromatherapy is the use of essential oils extracted from plants.
- B. Evidence has proved that aromatherapy is effective in treating dementia.
- C. People who feel aromatherapy is effective tend to believe it is useful.
- D. Aromatherapy is especially helpful for elderly patients.
26
What is Rachel Herz’s conclusion?
- A. The area of the brain which activates emotion has the same physiological structure as the part controlling olfaction.
- B. We cannot depend on smell, and people have more confidence in sight and spoken or written words.
- C. Odours can recall real memories even after the perfume-bottle experiment.
- D. Smell has proved its therapeutic effect over a long time span.

Reading Passage 3: Mark Strizic: A Career of an Australian Photographer

Mark Strizic, who passed away in December last year, was the last representative of a remarkable generation of European émigré photographers who settled in Australia after the Second World War. Alongside Wolfgang Sievers and Henry Talbot, Strizic contributed significantly to the visual culture of his adopted country. Yet, unlike many of his contemporaries, whose reputations were largely based on industrial or commercial photography, Strizic developed a career that was unusually complex. Over a span of five decades, he explored multiple photographic styles, experimented with new printing processes, engaged in book design, produced large-scale murals, and participated actively in teaching the next generation of photographers.

After his arrival in Melbourne from Zagreb in 1950, Strizic initially studied science, but soon turned to photography. From the mid-1950s he began to establish himself, not only through individual works but also through collaborations. One of his most enduring achievements was his partnership with the critic and historian David Saunders, with whom he produced Melbourne: A Portrait in 1960. The book was distinctive for its use of offset printing, a relatively new process at the time, which allowed photographs and text to be integrated seamlessly on the page. Strizic, as both photographer and designer, arranged his images so that one composition flowed into the next, often leaving areas of blank space or floating lines of text to balance the spreads. The result was a visually coherent book, which also carried an ambitious cultural agenda: Saunders’ text was printed in Italian and German as well as English, suggesting an international readership. The book’s bright and cheerful cover, designed by Leonard French, contributed to its appeal. In 1961 it was awarded Book of the Year, recognition not only of the photographs themselves but of the integrated design of the whole publication.

Strizic later admitted that the idea for Melbourne: A Portrait had been shaped by his father’s earlier work. His father, an architect in Zagreb, had published Light and Shade in 1955, a reflective “city book” in the European style, which contrasted sharply with the more commercial boosterism of contemporary Australian publications. Strizic deliberately sought to emulate this contemplative approach, presenting Melbourne as a modern yet cultured metropolis.

During the 1960s and 70s, Strizic continued to photograph the rapid transformation of Melbourne. His distinctive technique often involved pointing the camera directly into the sunlight, creating stark contrasts in which buildings and figures were reduced to silhouettes. Many of his images juxtapose old Victorian facades with newly constructed skyscrapers, capturing a city in the midst of radical expansion. Cars, highways and office towers dominate the frame, while human figures are frequently marginalised, squeezed into the bottom corners or overshadowed by the built environment. By the late 1970s, Strizic’s vision of Melbourne had grown darker. Using experimental methods, such as printing black-and-white negatives on colour paper or duplicating them onto high-contrast lithographic film, he produced cityscapes that glowed with intense, sometimes psychedelic colours, giving Melbourne an almost hallucinatory quality.

Collaboration remained central to Strizic’s career. In 1967 he worked with Sun Books, a small but ambitious publishing house, on several innovative projects. For Tim Burstall’s film 2000 Weeks he created a photo-roman, a paperback-sized publication in which his stills from the film were combined with dialogue. Although the film was produced in a European art-house style and tackled existential themes, it failed at the box office, and Strizic’s book met a similar fate. Nevertheless, the project demonstrated his willingness to experiment with new formats.

A more prestigious venture was Involvement (1968), a limited-edition art book edited by Andrew Grimwade. The concept was to pair Strizic’s photographic portraits with paintings by the artist Clifton Pugh. The accompanying text, written by Geoffrey Dutton, sought to place the collaboration in a grand cultural framework. Yet the book was widely regarded as unsatisfactory, largely because of its design. Unlike Melbourne: A Portrait, Strizic did not design the volume himself, and the layout by Les Gray failed to balance the colour plates of Pugh’s paintings with the black-and-white photographs. Despite this, Strizic’s portraits attracted attention for their originality. He employed experimental methods such as “pushing” his 35mm film to increase contrast and grain, and often shot his sitters against dominant backgrounds or with objects intruding into the foreground. The effect was to highlight their individuality and resistance to their surroundings. His portrait of Sir Charles Moses, head of the ABC, shows him through a haze of cigar smoke, while Barry Humphries appears surrounded by eccentric antiques in his London flat. These images were exhibited in 1968 at the National Gallery of Victoria under the title Some Australian Personalities, marking the institution’s first solo exhibition devoted to photography.

Strizic’s collaborative spirit extended into many other areas. He documented the sculptor John Davis and the furniture designer Schulim Krimper for monographs commissioned in the 1980s, but his connection with Krimper went back to 1959. He also worked with avant-garde artists such as Asher Bilu, producing the only surviving photographic record of Bilu’s interactive electronic work Sculptron (1967). This task required considerable technical skill, since Strizic had to balance the exposure for glowing cathode-ray tubes with the surrounding sculptural elements. In the field of murals, he developed large-scale photographic works for government buildings and corporate headquarters, sometimes combining his “photochromes” with paintings. A notable example was his collaboration with Stanislav Ostoja-Kotkowski in 1970 on a twelve-metre mural for the Ciba-Geigy building in Preston, which merged infrared photography with Strizic’s experimental prints.

That same year, Strizic worked with the influential architect Robin Boyd on Living in Australia, a book which sought to articulate Boyd’s design philosophy. Strizic’s photography reinforced Boyd’s arguments, presenting domestic architecture through dramatic diagonal compositions and sharp contrasts. The book was recently republished, confirming its continuing relevance.

In later years, Strizic combined his artistic practice with teaching in Melbourne’s new photography departments during the boom of the 1970s. In 1988 he returned to his earliest negatives of Melbourne, staging an exhibition that highlighted his long-standing interest in the city’s changing urban landscape. Since then, he has often been remembered as a nostalgic chronicler of “old Melbourne” or “disappearing Melbourne.” Yet such a label oversimplifies his contribution. His career was marked by continuous experimentation, by fruitful collaborations with artists, writers and designers, and by a willingness to engage with both traditional and avant-garde practices. In this sense, he occupies a significant though sometimes under-recognised position in the development of Australian visual culture.

Questions 27–32

Look at the following statements and the list of people below.

Match each statement with the correct person, A–F.

Write the correct letter, A–F, in boxes 27–32 on your answer sheet.

List of People

A David Saunders

B Andrew Grimwade

C Leonard French

D Strizic’s father

E Stanislav Ostoja-Kotkowski

F Geoffrey Dutton

27
Strizic worked with him to produce a book about Melbourne.
28
He edited the art book Involvement.
29
He designed the cover of Melbourne: A Portrait.
30
His book on Zagreb inspired Strizic’s Melbourne: A Portrait.
31
He collaborated with Strizic to combine photochromes with infrared photography.
32
He wrote the text for Involvement, which was considered pretentious.

Questions 33–37

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 3?

In boxes 33–37 on your answer sheet, write

TRUE if the statement agrees with the information

FALSE if the statement contradicts the information

NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this

33
2000 Weeks and its accompanying photo-roman were successful with the public.
- A. TRUE
- B. FALSE
- C. NOT GIVEN
34
Strizic’s portraits in Involvement were exhibited at the National Gallery of Victoria in 1968.
35
Strizic was one of the first to document the interactive artwork Sculptron.
36
Strizic’s photographic murals were produced with the help of advanced digital technology.
37
Strizic is best remembered solely as a nostalgic photographer of Melbourne.

Questions 38–40

Look at the following events and the list of years below.

Match each event with the correct year, A–D.

Write the correct letter, A–D, in boxes 38–40 on your answer sheet.

List of Years

A 1961

B 1968

C 1970

D 1988

38
Melbourne: A Portrait received the Book of the Year award.
39
Strizic collaborated with Robin Boyd on Living in Australia.
40
Strizic returned to his early negatives of Melbourne streets for an exhibition.

Answer sheet

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Show answer key

1. A
2. B
3. C
4. A
5. C
6. F
7. C
8. G
9. B
10. C
11. A
12. B
13. D
14. ix
15. iii
16. ii
17. vii
18. vi
19. B
20. A
21. D
22. B
23. C
24. A
25. C
The answer is C because the passage says findings suggest aromatherapy works only if you believe it will, meaning people who think it is effective tend to believe in its usefulness.
26. B
The answer is B because Herz says our noses can be tricked and people trust sight and words more than smell, showing we cannot depend on smell alone.
27. A
28. B
29. C
30. D
31. E
32. F
33. B
34. A
35. A
36. B
37. B
38. A
39. C
40. D

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Reading Passage 1: Listening to the Ocean

Reading Passage 2: Follow Your Nose

Reading Passage 3: Mark Strizic: A Career of an Australian Photographer

Answer sheet

Answer key