Reading 2026-10 Test 2 — 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: Australia's cane toad problem

In the north of Australia there are many sugar cane plantations, which early in the 20th century were being damaged by a particular pest. This was a species of beetle whose larvae, the infant form of the beetle, lived underground in the soil in the sugar cane fields. The sugar cane plants were weakened or died because their roots were eaten by the larvae. This had serious economic consequences for sugar cane farmers. Modern pesticides were not developed until the 1940s, so farmers had to use what was available at the time. Chemicals like arsenic and copper were used, but these were not only expensive but also stayed in the environment and were poisonous to people, plants and animals. It was generally acknowledged by government, farmers and scientists that cheaper and safer methods of pest control had to be found.

A promising replacement for copper and arsenic was the use of biological control. Farmers already used some forms of biological pest control in the form of predatory and parasitic wasps and flies, insect-eating birds, and plants from different regions or countries to control pests. Common practice was to release these introduced agents into new environments, the expectation being that they would destroy resident pests. Some species of toad already had successful records as agents of biological control in gardens. For example, in 19th century France toads were sold to gardeners at markets in Paris to eat insect pests in their gardens. In the early 20th century French sugar cane farmers first took giant toads from South America to control pests in their Caribbean sugar cane plantations. Although there is no evidence that these toads did help to control pests, sugar cane scientists then carried some of these toads from Jamaica and Barbados to Puerto Rico and from there to Hawaii.

The idea of biological control of pests was not new to Australia. For example, in 1926 there had been a highly successful prevention of the increase of the exotic prickly-pear cactus by the introduction of a moth from Argentina. This success added strength to the argument that biological control was the answer to the sugar cane industry’s pest problems. Accordingly, in the early 1930s a decision was taken to introduce the giant South American toads, which in Australia are now commonly called cane toads, into Australian sugar cane plantations.

In 1935, an Australian entomologist brought 101 cane toads from Hawaii and released them in sugar cane plantations in the north of Australia. However, over the following years it became clear that the cane toads were a failure. There was a fatal flaw in the plan to use them as a form of biological control. This was that earthbound cane toads were expected to eat the mostly flying adult beetles in order to eliminate the soil-dwelling beetle larvae that ate the roots of the cane sugar plants. This, of course, cane toads could not do.

Prior to their introduction in Australia, there had been very few opponents and only one made his views public. He was a retired former Chief Entomologist from the state government of New South Wales named Walter Froggatt. He forecast that cane toads might become as great a pest in Australia as rabbits. However, Froggatt’s peers rebuked him and eminent scientists branded his views ‘decidedly pessimistic’. It is estimated that today as many as a hundred million cane toads form a toxic infestation which is slowly spreading throughout the land.

Cane toads are large, heavily built amphibians. Average-sized adults are 10-15 cm long and weigh more than a kilo. They have large swellings on each shoulder from which they squirt poison when they are threatened. This venom contains 14 different chemicals, but they do not appear to be harmful to humans as no-one has died in Australia from cane toad poison. Until recently there was no understanding of the toxicity of cane toad poison, but it is now clear that freshwater crocodiles, goannas (large lizards) and dingoes (wild dogs) have died after eating cane toads. Cane toads compete with native Australian fauna for food, and eat the eggs and young of ground-nesting birds. As their numbers increase, they are taking over more and more of the land where native Australian fauna live.

The lesson that can be learned from the introduction of cane toads is important. It is wrong to think that such an awful biological event could not be repeated. In this instance, the catalyst was the overwhelming consensus of support for introducing cane toads to Australia. The error was that there was little or no testing of these biological agents before they were introduced to see what unplanned effects they might have on the environment.

Questions 1–7

Complete the notes below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 1–7 on your answer sheet.

Pest control

Early 20th-century problems in Australia

The larvae of a type of (1) ________ were a serious pest in sugar cane fields.

Its larvae ate the (2) ________ of the plant.

Chemical pesticides were unsatisfactory because they were:

poisonous

(3) ________

difficult to remove from the ground

Experiences with biological pest control

The use of insects, plants and birds was widespread.

In the 19th century, French (4) ________ used toads.

In Australia, a (5) ________ stopped the spread of prickly-pear cactus.

Cane toads were brought to Australia from (6) ________.

Cane toads proved to be a (7) ________ as pest control.

Questions 8–13

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

In boxes 8–13 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

8
The outcome of the introduction of cane toads was immediately obvious.
- A. TRUE
- B. FALSE
- C. NOT GIVEN
9
Rabbits were introduced to Australia to control weeds.
10
Walter Froggatt was criticised for his efforts to stop the introduction of the cane toad to Australia.
11
The average size of cane toads has increased since their introduction.
12
Australian animals can eat cane toads safely.
13
In many places cane toads are gaining control of the habitats of Australian fauna.

Reading Passage 2: A Unique Golden Textile

A rare textile made from the silk of more than a million wild spiders has been on display at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. To produce this golden cloth, 70 people spent four years collecting golden-orb spiders from telephone poles in Madagascar, while another dozen workers carefully extracted about 80 feet of silk filament from each of the arachnids. The resulting 11-foot-by-4-foot textile is the only large piece of cloth made from natural spider silk in the world today.

Spider silk is very elastic and strong compared with steel or Kevlar, said textile expert Simon Peers, who co-led the project. Kevlar is a lightweight synthetic fabric, chemically related to nylon, that is used in bullet-proof vests. Kevlar is resistant to wear, tear and heat and has virtually no melting point. But the tensile strength of spider silk is even greater than Kevlar’s aramid filaments and higher than that of high-grade steel. Most importantly, spider silk is extremely lightweight: a strand long enough to circle the Earth would weigh less than 500 grams (18 oz). It is also especially ductile, able to stretch up to 140 percent of its length without breaking and to retain its strength below –40 °C, giving it toughness equal to that of leading commercial fibres.

Researchers have long been intrigued by the unique properties of spider silk. Unfortunately, spider silk is extremely hard to mass-produce. Unlike silkworms—easy to raise in captivity—spiders have a habit of biting off each other’s heads when housed together. According to Peers, there is intensive research worldwide aimed at replicating spider-silk tensile properties for use in medicine and industry, but no-one has yet reproduced all the qualities of natural silk.

Peers conceived the idea of weaving spider silk after reading about French missionary Jacob Paul Camboué, who worked with spiders in Madagascar during the 1880s and 1890s. Camboué built a small hand-driven machine to extract silk from up to 24 spiders at once, without harming them: the spiders were briefly restrained, their silk collected, then released. Peers built a replica of this 24-spider “silking” machine, said co-leader Nicholas Godley. As a test the pair collected about 20 spiders. “When we stuck them in the machine and started turning it, lo and behold, this beautiful gold-coloured silk started coming out,” Godley recalled.

To make a textile of any significant size, the scale had to increase dramatically. Fourteen thousand spiders yield about an ounce of silk, Godley said, and the finished textile weighs about 2.6 pounds. By the end, handlers had worked with more than one million female golden-orb spiders—abundant in Madagascar and famed for their golden thread. Because the spiders produce silk only in the rainy season, all were collected between October and June. An additional 12 workers used hand-powered machines to extract the silk and twist it into 96-filament yarn. After “silking”, the spiders were released; within a week they regenerate their silk, allowing the same individuals to be used again—“the gift that never stops giving,” said Godley.

Spending four years to produce a single piece of cloth is hardly practical for scientists or companies hoping to exploit spider silk in biomedicine or as a Kevlar alternative. Several groups have inserted spider genes into bacteria and even goats to make silk, but results have been only partly successful. One reason is that spider silk begins as a liquid protein produced in a special gland in the abdomen. Using the spinneret, the spider applies force that rearranges the protein’s molecular structure, transforming it into solid fibre. “When we talk about a spider spinning silk, we’re talking about how it applies forces to convert liquid to solid,” explained spider-silk expert Todd Blackledge of the University of Akron, who was not involved in the project. “Every year we get closer to mass production, but we’re not there yet.” For now, we must be content with one extraordinarily beautiful cloth—courtesy of more than a million spiders.

Questions 14–19

Reading Passage 2 has six paragraphs, A–F.

Choose the correct heading for each paragraph from the list of headings below.

Write the correct number, i–ix, in boxes 14–19 on your answer sheet.

List of Headings

i Experimenting with an old idea

ii Life cycle of Madagascar spiders

iii Advances in the textile industry

iv Resources needed to meet the project’s demands

v The physical properties of spider silk

vi A scientific analysis of spider silk

vii A unique work of art

viii Importance of the silk-textile market

ix Difficulties of raising spiders in captivity

14
Paragraph A
15
Paragraph B
16
Paragraph C
17
Paragraph D
18
Paragraph E
19
Paragraph F

Questions 20–23

Look at the following statements (Questions 20–23) and the list of researchers below.

Match each statement with the correct researcher, A, B or C.

Write the correct letter, A, B or C, in boxes 20–23 on your answer sheet.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

List of Researchers

A Simon Peers

B Nicholas Godley

C Todd Blackledge

20
It takes a tremendous number of spiders to make a small amount of silk.
21
Scientists want to use the qualities of spider silk for medical purposes.
22
Scientists are making some progress in their efforts to manufacture spider silk.
23
Spider silk compares favourably to materials known for their strength.

Questions 24–26

Complete the summary below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

Write your answers in boxes 24–26 on your answer sheet.

Producing spider silk in the lab

Both scientists and manufacturers are interested in producing silk for many different purposes.

Some researchers have tried to grow silk by introducing genetic material into (24) ________ and some animals.

But these experiments have been somewhat disappointing.

It is difficult to make spider silk in a lab setting because the silk comes from a liquid protein made in a (25) ________ inside the spider’s body.

When a spider spins silk, it applies (26) ________ that turns this liquid into solid silk.

Scientists cannot replicate this yet.

Reading Passage 3: Darwin and Evolutionary Psychology

Charles Darwin, the brilliant anthropologist and creator of the theory of evolution, is not normally associated with the modern business world. Nevertheless, Darwinian evolutionary theory is the foundation of a new wave of ideas about human behaviour in general and particularly the way people behave in the workplace; these ideas have given the title of ‘evolutionary psychology’. Evolutionary psychology revolves around the notion that our brains, like our bodies, have an inherited evolutionary design that has scarcely changed for 10,000 years. As respected evolutionary psychology experts Leda Cosmides and John Tooby comment, ‘our modern skulls house a Stone Age mind’. The US biologist Edward O. Wilson sees evolutionary psychology as being a discipline which is based on both sociobiology, which is the study of the biological basis of social behaviour, and psychology, which is the systematic study of human behaviour.

Nigel Nicholson, an organisational psychologist from the London Business School, is a strong supporter of evolutionary psychology and on this subject has published Managing the Human Animal. His book takes the reader on a journey from the Stone Age plains of the savannah to the modern office, and includes a discussion of Darwinism and behavioural psychology, together with a dissection of dysfunctional organisational behaviour. It is an effective approach explaining why people behave as they do, particularly at work. Evolutionary psychology is increasingly being cited in management circles, where managers are trying to understand puzzling aspects of human behaviour and, by doing so, improve the workplace. Nicholson believes that evolutionary psychology can help managers understand what goes wrong in organisational life and what they can do about it.

Nicholson maintains that evolutionary psychology dismisses the long-held assumption that our minds are like blank pages just waiting for culture and experience to write on them and shape our nature. He points out that sophisticated research shows the brain actually houses a store of knowledge when we are born, and now genetic research is establishing there are certain genes that account for abilities, tastes and tendencies. The stored knowledge in the human brain has not changed much since the Stone Age. As Tooby and Cosmides stress, there have not been enough generations for a brain that is well-adapted to our post-industrial life to evolve through natural selection.

The evolutionary psychology version of human nature revolves around some key elements which we have inherited from our hunter-gatherer minds. One key element is emotion. Emotion was originally essential to keep early man alive and safe from predators. Emotion was, and continues to be, our radar, guiding us throughout today’s techno-defined business world. Despite this, the business world emphasises rational, not emotional, behaviour, and does not admit the importance of emotion. We still use the emotional part of our minds to make sense of other people’s behaviour and to create an impression, so we can often be taken in by appearances. This mental predisposition actually works best in small communities (the tribe), not in much larger environments filled with people we barely know (the modern workplace). Our minds naturally try to re-create our ancestral communities with networks of no more than 150 people, where there are clear hierarchies and leaders. As a consequence, it takes very little to trigger people’s innate distrust of others because our safety in antiquity depended on supporting our near family and friends, whom we valued more than other people.

So what advice does Nicholson have for the corporate world? He thinks that by knowing the reasons for people’s behaviour it is possible to mould corporate environments into places that have more chance of working efficiently and being pleasant places to work in. Nicholson admits that not everybody in the business world agrees with his belief in the effectiveness of evolutionary psychology in the workplace. One group that resists the theory of evolutionary psychology is young MBA graduates who are just beginning their careers and feel that evolutionary psychology will make their lives at work more difficult. Older and wiser executives point out that they still tend to cling to the idea of a magic formula to bring people into line with corporate strategy. But that is back-to-front thinking, according to Nicholson, who contends that we should be reinventing our business structures, not our fundamental human nature.

At the end of his book, Nicholson gives his forecast of what will and will not change in the business world. He believes that most people will still prefer more traditional forms of work and throughout their lives will continue to aim at lifelong status advancement. He also maintains that the line between work and home will be less defined, but that people will prefer traditional working patterns if working from home leaves them isolated from their work community. He doubts that the high-tech ideas of virtual companies will ever be very successful because people will still want to meet each other face-to-face. Nicholson describes his ideal organisation in the future: it would be decentralised, with small sub-units; the staff would be from diverse backgrounds and be allowed a high degree of self-determination. New endeavours and creativity would replace systems and rationality. Nicholson acknowledges that there is a long way to go in terms of the translation of his ideas of evolutionary psychology into practical propositions, but he is confident more and more people will come round to his way of thinking.

Questions 27–31

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

Write the correct letter in boxes 27–31 on your answer sheet.

27. The writer’s purpose in the first paragraph is to
- A. oppose the views of Charles Darwin.
- B. compare experts’ opinions of Darwin’s theory.
- C. explain the theory of evolutionary psychology.
- D. name experts in the field of evolutionary psychology.
28. In the third paragraph, which view about evolutionary psychology matches Nicholson’s opinion?
- A. Our characters determine our career choices.
- B. We begin life without any preconceived notions.
- C. Our interests and skills depend on our environment.
- D. We inherit ideas and characteristics from our ancestors.
29. The writer discusses the key element of emotion in order to
- A. criticise primitive survival strategies.
- B. explain attitudes and actions at work.
- C. demonstrate the slowness of evolution.
- D. suggest companies today are poorly structured.
30. Which of the following does Nicholson predict will happen in the business world?
- A. Companies will remain in city centres.
- B. Promotion will no longer motivate people.
- C. Employees will be less independent than now.
- D. Social interaction will remain important to workers.
31. Which of the following is the most suitable title for Reading Passage 3?
- A. How successful companies manage change.
- B. Understanding the origins of workplace behaviour.
- C. Darwin’s theories rejected by modern management.
- D. Why post-industrial organisations need to evolve more quickly.

Questions 32–35

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer in Reading Passage 3?

In boxes 32–35 on your answer sheet, write

YES if the statement agrees with the claims of the writer

NO if the statement contradicts the claims of the writer

NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this

32. Nicholson makes a persuasive argument in his book.
- A. YES
- B. NO
- C. NOT GIVEN
33. Tooby and Cosmides believe natural selection through the generations has prepared us for modern times.
34. Our reliance on technology causes emotional problems in the workplace.
35. People today are more trusting than they used to be.

Questions 36–40

Complete the summary using the list of words, A–I, below.

Write the correct letter, A–I, in boxes 36–40 on your answer sheet.

Nicholson’s advice to the corporate world

Nicholson believes that if we know why people act the way they do, we can change (36) ________ so employees will work more efficiently.

Nicholson’s ideas are unwelcome to (37) ________, but some executives are more open to what evolutionary psychology says.

However, these executives still believe that there is a (38) ________ that will make employees act according to the company’s practices.

According to Nicholson, these senior executives are engaging in (39) ________, and we should not try to change (40) ________ but instead we should change our business structures.

A business leaders

B MBA graduates

C promotion structures

D reward strategy

E magic formula

F strategic planning

G back-to-front thinking

H business environments

I human nature

Answer sheet

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Show answer key

1. beetle
2. roots
3. expensive
4. gardeners
5. moth
6. Hawaii
7. failure
8. B
The answer is B (FALSE) because the passage says 'over the following years it became clear,' showing the outcome was not immediately obvious.
9. C
The answer is C (NOT GIVEN) because the passage does not mention why rabbits were introduced to Australia.
10. A
The answer is A (TRUE) because the passage says Walter Froggatt 'was rebuked' and 'eminent scientists branded his views ‘decidedly pessimistic’.'
11. C
The answer is C (NOT GIVEN) because the passage does not say anything about the average size of cane toads increasing.
12. B
The answer is B (FALSE) because the passage says 'freshwater crocodiles, goannas... and dingoes... have died after eating cane toads.'
13. A
The answer is A (TRUE) because the passage says cane toads 'are taking over more and more of the land where native Australian fauna live.'
14. vii
15. v
16. ix
17. i
18. iv
19. vi
20. B
21. A
22. C
23. A
24. bacteria
25. gland
26. force
27. C
The answer is C (explain the theory of evolutionary psychology) because the first paragraph introduces and explains what evolutionary psychology is.
28. D
The answer is D (We inherit ideas and characteristics from our ancestors) because Nicholson says 'the brain actually houses a store of knowledge when we are born' and this has 'not changed much since the Stone Age.'
29. B
The answer is B (explain attitudes and actions at work) because the passage says emotion helps us make sense of other people’s behaviour, especially at work.
30. D
The answer is D (Social interaction will remain important to workers) because Nicholson predicts that 'people will still want to meet each other face-to-face.'
31. B
The answer is B (Understanding the origins of workplace behaviour) because the passage is about how evolutionary psychology explains why people behave as they do at work.
32. A
The answer is A (YES) because the passage says Nicholson's book is 'an effective approach explaining why people behave as they do, particularly at work.'
33. B
The answer is B (NO) because Tooby and Cosmides say 'there have not been enough generations for a brain that is well-adapted to our post-industrial life to evolve.'
34. C
The answer is C (NOT GIVEN) because the passage does not say that technology causes emotional problems in the workplace.
35. B
The answer is B (NO) because the passage says 'it takes very little to trigger people’s innate distrust of others,' showing people are not more trusting than before.
36. H
37. B
38. E
39. G
40. I

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Reading Passage 1: Australia's cane toad problem

Reading Passage 2: A Unique Golden Textile

Reading Passage 3: Darwin and Evolutionary Psychology

Answer sheet

Answer key