Reading 2026-05 Test 50 — 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: Triumph of the City

Triumph of the City, by Edward Glaeser, is a thrilling and very readable hymn of praise to an invention so vast and so effective that it is generally taken for granted. More than half the global population already live in urban areas and, every month, five million more flood into the cities of the developed and developing worlds. The crowds and poverty of some of these modern cities may horrify us. They shouldn’t, says Glaeser; they are signs of growth, energy and aspiration. Cities are our best and brightest hope.

This idea has had more than two hundred years of resistance. Not long after the Industrial Revolution began in Britain, the Romantic poets turned away from the smoke and factories of their cities to celebrate the air and light of untouched nature. In 19th-century America, the writer Henry David Thoreau retreated to the wilderness of Walden Pond to live the solitary, simple life, and convinced generations of Americans that cities were bad and nature was good.

They had, Glaeser admits, a point. The early industrial cities were dirty, since they lacked efficient waste-disposal systems, and disease spread rapidly among the population. But more importantly they were profitable, and there were enormous commercial incentives to make them work, as well as political ones. Their transformation could be achieved at a stroke: in the second half of the 19th century, the French Emperor Napoleon III gave Baron Haussmann unrestricted power to turn the slum-infested city of Paris into one of the wonders and delights of the modern world. Or the transformation could be done by trial and error. Glaeser gives a brilliant account of the stop-start progression of New York to its late 20th-century position as the cultural and economic centre of the world. Either way, Paris, New York and other cities developed because they were truly effective markets of ideas and innovation.

For these and many other reasons, we should not be so upset by the spectacle of urban poverty. The poor flock to cities in the hope of becoming richer (which, by and large, they do). They also reinvigorate the economy of the city. It is folly to drive them away by forcing property prices to soar with unreasonable planning regulations. Instead, cities should build more houses and thereby hold property prices in check.

It can go wrong, of course. In Glaeser’s view, this is primarily because municipal authorities fail to understand the principal virtues of their cities. The heart of Paris, as many Parisians say, is turning into a museum because of the desire to preserve Baron Haussmann’s 19th-century boulevards. Glaeser defends their preservation, but argues that in the 1950s the French made a mistake in establishing a huge high-rise commercial development — La Défense — on the outskirts of the city. Far better, he says, to have turned the central area of Montparnasse into a new commercial district. This would have revitalised much of the city centre without destroying its fabric. In India, Mumbai could save itself from ever-more inefficient sprawl over the surrounding area simply by relaxing the rules presently imposed on the height of new constructions.

In America, it is the suburbs that have proved to be the real disaster. Glaeser is repentant on this subject himself. He moved to the suburbs when he had children. His entirely legitimate excuse is that the government made him (and millions like him) do it. By under-taxing petrol and imposing tight planning restrictions on inner cities that drove up the cost of property, it made flight to the suburbs more or less inevitable for the middle classes.

This is a disaster because nothing is more inefficient than a suburb. Suburbanites mingle less, and lose the face-to-face contact that makes being an urbanite so much more creative. Moreover, houses are costlier to heat and cool than flats, and suburbanites drive thousands more miles per year than city dwellers. Every aspect of life involves more consumption. This leads to the strongest and newest argument in favour of cities — they are good for the environment. To live in the country or the suburbs is to have a vastly larger carbon footprint than any urbanite.

Full of characters and accessible information, this is a tremendous book, not least because, like me, you will find yourself constantly seeking reasons to disagree. Like the poor in the city, this is a sign of success. If you hate the city and get moist-eyed at the thought of the country then, one way or another, Glaeser is the man you will have to take on.

1
Problems with early cities: dirt, _______
2
but there were commercial and _______ reasons for improving them
3
Urban poverty is not a major problem because poor people generally get _______
4
Urban poverty is not a major problem because poor people help to develop the urban _______
5
Cities do have some problems – e.g. the centre of Paris is becoming a _______
6
In the US, the middle classes have moved to the suburbs due to cheap petrol, high _______ prices in inner cities
7
Disadvantages of suburbs: less personal _______
8
Disadvantages of suburbs: increased _______ of resources such as heating – which damages the environment
9
Glaeser believes that congestion and poverty in some modern cities indicate serious problems.
- TRUE. TRUE
- FALSE. FALSE
- NOT GIVEN. NOT GIVEN
10
The writer Henry David Thoreau discussed the ideas of the Romantic poets in his work.
11
Emperor Napoleon III was influenced by the complaints of poor people living in Paris.
12
Strict planning regulations may be beneficial for a city’s development.
13
Glaeser argues that the location of commercial development at La Défense was a bad idea.

Reading Passage 2: The Power of Music

A Robert Matthews looks at research into the effects of music. Music is becoming ever more popular electronically. To meet our craving for music, internet sites are using increasingly sophisticated ways of putting us in touch with artists we may not even know we like. Most work by trawling our existing files or online listening habits and looking for patterns so they can recommend new artists for their subscribers to listen to. The search often turns up surprises. But is it possible to tease apart our likes and dislikes to identify precisely what it is about some music that thrills us or leaves us cold?

For centuries composers have sought to create unforgettable music using accepted notions about the emotional appeal of certain combinations of sounds, yet only now are scientists starting to uncover what it is about these combinations that can have such a dramatic effect on our minds. Given that archaeologists have found musical instruments played by Neanderthals at least 50,000 years ago, why have scientists taken so long to investigate such a source of pleasure?

‘For psychologists, who are always desperate to show that their work is rigorous, there’s an image problem in tackling the emotionality of music,’ says Professor Norman Cook of Kansai University in Osaka, Japan, one of the pioneers of the new science of music. ‘Emotion is such a slippery topic.’ The other problem, says Cook, is the long-standing principle among psychologists that our response to music is an acquired one, rather than something that is stimulated by the effect of sound on our brain cells. Yet one of the first insights to emerge from this new branch of psychology is that music affects our brains at a very basic level.

Together with his colleague, Professor Takefumi Hayashi, Cook has been investigating one of the best-known examples of the emotional impact of music: the difference between major and minor chords. For centuries, composers have known that notes arranged to form major chords sound happy and upbeat, while those in minor chords sound mournful. In tests, even three-year-olds have been shown to link music in a major mode to happy faces and minor modes to sad faces.

According to Cook, analysis of how people respond to notes suggests a link with how our brains interpret certain sounds in everyday life. He points out that sad-sounding minor chords can be formed by raising the pitch of any of a set of notes, while dropping the pitch produces a major chord. The same change in pitch works as an emotional telltale in communication between some mammals, where rising pitch is used to communicate weakness or defeat, while falling pitch signals social dominance. It’s also present in our speech. ‘A rising inflection is used to denote questions, politeness or deference, whereas a falling inflection signals dominance,’ says Cook.

This suggests that music in major and minor modes taps into some very basic features of how we relate to the world and each other – perhaps dating back millions of years. Could music in general be doing something similar? Quite possibly, according to research into how music triggers certain types of brain activity. At McGill University in Canada, Professor Robert Zatorre and his colleagues have carried out studies in which volunteers listen to different types of music while their brain activity is monitored. The biggest surprise was the evidence that pleasurable music activates brain circuitry which has been in existence in the human brain for thousands of years, says Zatorre. ‘We share it with rats and other distant relatives on the evolutionary tree – and it’s typically associated with biological rewards, like food, for example.’

At the University of Oxford, Dr Joyce Chen has been looking into another celebrated feature of music – the irresistibility of rhythm. Her interest was sparked by studies involving patients with movement difficulties. If music that had a strong rhythm – say, a marching band – was played to these patients, they were able to improve their walking ability, says Chen. In an attempt to find out why the simple act of listening to music might help disabled patients, Dr Chen and colleagues from the International Laboratory for Brain, Music and Sound Research in Montreal carried out brain scans on volunteers who were listening to rhythmic sounds. The criteria for selecting these volunteers were that they should be in first-rate physical health but musically untrained. The results have been another revelation. Chen and her colleagues found the rhythms triggered activity in parts of the brain linked to hearing, but something even more surprising was that the rhythms also triggered activity in the motor regions of the brain, linked to active movement.

‘Somehow, the mere act of just listening triggers motor-neural activity. Maybe this is one reason why we often tap our feet, move or dance when hearing music,’ says Chen. She believes the discovery of this deep connection between music and movement may cast light on why disabled patients can benefit from listening to music – and could also prove useful with other impairments such as those involved in sound production. ‘It’s been shown that people who talk with a stutter might have problems in this auditory-motor loop.’

For researchers working in this new area of science, these early discoveries hold the promise of much more to come. Zatorre and his colleagues are investigating whether some people have more musical brains than others. ‘We can see certain subtle brain features that can tell us how well somebody can do things like identify a slight change in a melody,’ explains Zatorre. ‘This ability could be enhanced by training – just like someone born with a predisposition to building strong muscles can enhance them by taking up weightlifting.’

14
a reference to studies involving children
15
a mention of the discovery of significant artefacts
16
reasons why a particular aspect of music has not been researched
17
a mention of an unexpected discovery involving two different areas of the brain
18
a comparison of tone variations produced by certain animals and humans
19
The participants in this study led by Dr Chen were chosen because they were not musicians, and they demonstrated a good state of _______.
20
The participants were given _______ while music with a very noticeable rhythm was being played.
21
Previous research had indicated that listening to this type of music seemed to be of assistance to some _______ people.
22
By listening to it, their _______ ability had definitely got better.
23
Research into the brain activity set off by music may help people with speech defects.
- A. Professor Norman Cook
- B. Professor Robert Zatorre
- C. Dr Joyce Chen
24
It may be possible in time to improve a person’s ability to recognise certain musical characteristics.
25
The way listeners react to certain musical combinations may be similar to the way they react to other noises.
26
When a person reacts positively to music, the same parts of the brain are stimulated as when certain animals react to a positive outcome.

Reading Passage 3: Living Dunes

When you think of a sand dune, you probably picture a barren pile of lifeless sand. But sand dunes are actually dynamic natural structures. They grow, shift and travel. They crawl with living things. Some sand dunes even sing.

A Although no more than a pile of wind-blown sand, dunes can roll over trees and buildings, march relentlessly across highways, devour vehicles on its path, and threaten crops and factories in Africa, the Middle East, and China. In some places, killer dunes even roll in and swallow up towns. Entire villages have disappeared under the sand. In a few instances the government built new villages for those displaced only to find that new villages themselves were buried several years later. Preventing sand dunes from overwhelming cities and agricultural areas has become a priority for the United Nations Environment Program.

B Some of the most significant experimental measurements on sand movement were performed by Ralph Bagnold, a British engineer who worked in Egypt prior to World War II. Bagnold investigated the physics of particles moving through the atmosphere and deposited by wind. He recognised two basic dune types, the crescentic dune, which he called “barchan,” and the linear dune, which he called longitudinal or “sief” (Arabic for “sword”). The crescentic barchan dune is the most common type of sand dune. As its name suggests, this dune is shaped like a crescent moon with points at each end, and it is usually wider than it is long. Some types of barchan dunes move faster over desert surfaces than any other type of dune. The linear dune is straighter than the crescentic dune with ridges as its prominent feature. Unlike crescentic dunes, linear dunes are longer than they are wide — in fact, some are more than 100 miles (about 160 kilometers) long. Dunes can also be comprised of smaller dunes of different types, called complex dunes.

C Despite the complicated dynamics of dune formation, Bagnold noted that a sand dune generally needs the following three things to form: a large amount of loose sand in an area with little vegetation— usually on the coast or in a dried-up river, lake or sea bed; a wind or breeze to move the grains of sand; and an obstacle, which could be as small as a rock or as big as a tree, that causes the sand to lose momentum and settle. Where these three variables merge, a sand dune forms.

D As the wind picks up the sand, the sand travels, but generally only about an inch or two above the ground, until an obstacle causes it to stop. The heaviest grains settle against the obstacle, and a small ridge or bump forms. The lighter grains deposit themselves on the other side of the obstacle. Wind continues to move sand up to the top of the pile until the pile is so steep that it collapses under its own weight. The collapsing sand comes to rest when it reaches just the right steepness to keep the dune stable. The repeating cycle of sand inching up the windward side to the dune crest, then slipping down the dune’s slip face allows the dune to inch forward, migrating in the direction the wind blows.

E Depending on the speed and direction of the wind and the weight of the local sand, dunes will develop into different shapes and sizes. Stronger winds tend to make taller dunes; gentler winds tend to spread them out. If the direction of the wind generally is the same over the years, dunes gradually shift in that direction. But a dune is “a curiously dynamic creature”, wrote Farouk El-Baz in National Geographic. Once formed, a dune can grow, change shape, move with the wind and even breed new dunes. Some of these offspring may be carried on the back of the mother dune. Others are born and race downwind, outpacing their parents.

F Sand dunes even can be heard ‘singing’ in more than 30 locations worldwide, and in each place the sounds have their own characteristic frequency, or note. When the thirteenth century explorer Marco Polo encountered the weird and wonderful noises made by desert sand dunes, he attributed them to evil spirits. The sound is unearthly. The volume is also unnerving. Adding to the tone’s otherworldliness is the inability of the human ear to localise the source of the noise. Stéphane Douady of the French national research agency CNRS and his colleagues have been delving deeper into dunes in Morocco, Chile, China and Oman, and believe they can now explain the exact mechanism behind this acoustic phenomenon.

G The group hauled sand back to the laboratory and set it up in channels with automated pushing plates. The sands still sang, proving that the dune itself was not needed to act as a resonating body for the sound, as some researchers had theorised. To make the booming sound, the grains have to be of a small range of sizes, all alike in shape: well-rounded. Douady’s key discovery was that this synchronised frequency— which determines the tone of sound— is the result of the grain size. The larger the grain, the lower the key. He has successfully predicted the notes emitted by dunes in Morocco, Chile and the US simply by measuring the size of the grains they contain. Douady also discovered that the singing grains had some kind of varnish or a smooth coating of various minerals: silicon, iron and manganese, which probably formed on the sand when the dunes once lay beneath an ancient ocean. But in the muted grains this coat had been worn away, which explains why only some dunes can sing. He admits he is unsure exactly what role the coating plays in producing the noise. The mysterious dunes, it seems, aren’t quite ready yet to give up all of their secrets.

27
Paragraph A
- i. shaping and reforming
- ii. causes of desertification
- iii. need combination of specific conditions
- iv. potential threat to industry and communication
- v. an old superstition demystified
- vi. differences and similarities
- vii. a continuous cycling process
- viii. habitat for rare species
- ix. replicating the process in laboratory
- x. commonest type of dune
28
Paragraph B
29
Paragraph C
30
Paragraph D
31
Paragraph E
32
Paragraph F
33
Paragraph G
34
Complete the sentence: ________ dune is said to have long ridges that can extend hundreds of miles.
35
Complete the sentence: According to Bagnold, an ________ is needed to stop the sand from moving before a dune can form.
36
Complete the sentence: Stéphane Douady believes the singing of dunes is not a spiritual phenomenon, but purely ________.
37
Summary completion: There are many different types of dunes, two of which are most commonly found in deserts throughout the world, the linear dune and the 37............................ dune, sometimes also known as the crescentic dune.
38
Summary completion: To produce singing sand in lab, all the sands must have similar 38............................ .
39
Summary completion: And scientists have discovered that the size of the sand can affect the 39............................ of the sound.
40
Summary completion: But the function of the varnish composed by a mixture of 40............................ still remains puzzling.

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1. disease
The answer is 'disease' because the passage says early cities had problems like 'dirt and disease.'
2. political
The answer is 'political' as the passage mentions 'commercial and political reasons' for improving cities.
3. richer
The answer is 'richer' because the passage explains that poor people in cities usually get richer over time.
4. economy
The answer is 'economy' since the passage says poor people help to develop the urban economy.
5. museum
The answer is 'museum' because the passage states that the centre of Paris is becoming a 'museum,' meaning it is losing its local life.
6. property
The answer is 'property' as the passage notes that high property prices in inner cities push the middle classes to the suburbs.
7. contact
The answer is 'contact' because the passage says suburbs have less personal contact between people.
8. consumption
The answer is 'consumption' since the passage mentions increased consumption of resources like heating in suburbs.
9. FALSE
The answer is 'FALSE' because Glaeser does not believe congestion and poverty show serious problems; he sees them as signs of a successful city. The tempting wrong answer 'TRUE' fails because it misunderstands his view.
10. NOT GIVEN
The answer is 'NOT GIVEN' as the passage does not mention Henry David Thoreau discussing the Romantic poets.
11. NOT GIVEN
The answer is 'NOT GIVEN' because there is no information about Napoleon III being influenced by complaints from poor people.
12. FALSE
The answer is 'FALSE' since the passage says strict planning regulations are not beneficial for a city's development.
13. TRUE
The answer is 'TRUE' because Glaeser argues that putting commercial development at La Défense was a bad idea.
14. D
The answer is 'D' as this section refers to studies involving children.
15. B
The answer is 'B' because this part mentions the discovery of significant artefacts.
16. C
The answer is 'C' since this section gives reasons why a certain aspect of music has not been researched.
17. G
The answer is 'G' because it mentions an unexpected discovery involving two different areas of the brain.
18. E
The answer is 'E' as this part compares tone variations produced by animals and humans.
19. physical health
The answer is 'physical health' because the participants were chosen for being non-musicians and in good physical health.
20. brain scans
The answer is 'brain scans' since the participants were given brain scans while listening to music with a strong rhythm.
21. disabled
The answer is 'disabled' because previous research showed this type of music helped disabled people.
22. walking
The answer is 'walking' as their walking ability improved by listening to the music.
23. C
The answer is 'C' (Dr Joyce Chen) because she researches how music and brain activity may help people with speech defects.
24. B
The answer is 'B' (Professor Robert Zatorre) as he suggests it may be possible to improve recognition of musical characteristics.
25. A
The answer is 'A' (Professor Norman Cook) because he says reactions to musical combinations may be like reactions to other noises.
26. B
The answer is 'B' (Professor Robert Zatorre) since he notes that positive responses to music and animal rewards stimulate the same brain areas.
27. iv
The answer is 'iv' because Paragraph A talks about dunes as a potential threat to industry and communication.
28. x
The answer is 'x' since Paragraph B describes the commonest type of dune.
29. iii
The answer is 'iii' because Paragraph C explains the need for a combination of specific conditions for dunes to form.
30. vii
The answer is 'vii' as Paragraph D discusses the continuous cycling process of dunes.
31. i
The answer is 'i' because Paragraph E is about shaping and reforming dunes.
32. v
The answer is 'v' since Paragraph F demystifies an old superstition about dunes.
33. ix
The answer is 'ix' because Paragraph G is about replicating the process in the laboratory.
34. linear
The answer is 'linear' because the passage says linear dunes have long ridges that can extend hundreds of miles.
35. obstacle
The answer is 'obstacle' as Bagnold says an obstacle is needed to stop sand movement before a dune can form.
36. acoustic
The answer is 'acoustic' since Stéphane Douady believes the singing of dunes is a purely acoustic phenomenon, not spiritual.
37. barchan
The answer is 'barchan' because the summary says the barchan dune is also known as the crescentic dune.
38. shape
The answer is 'shape' as all the sands must have similar shape to produce singing sand in the lab.
39. tone
The answer is 'tone' because the size of the sand affects the tone of the sound.
40. minerals
The answer is 'minerals' since the function of the varnish made of minerals is still puzzling.

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Reading Passage 1: Triumph of the City

Reading Passage 2: The Power of Music

Reading Passage 3: Living Dunes

Answer sheet

Answer key