Reading 2026-07 Test 16

Exam month: 2026-07

In this test

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: Money Transfers by Mobile

A. The ping of a text message has never sounded so sweet. In what is being touted as a world first, Kenya’s biggest mobile operator is allowing subscribers to send cash to other phone users by SMS. Known as M-Pesa, or mobile money, the service is expected to revolutionise banking in a country where more than 80% of people are excluded from the formal financial sector. Apart from transferring cash - a service much in demand among urban Kenyans supporting relatives in rural areas - customers of the Safaricom network will be able to keep up to 50,000 shillings (£370) in a “virtual account” on their handsets.
B. Developed by Vodafone, which holds a 35% share in Safaricom, M-Pesa was formally launched in Kenya two weeks ago. More than 10,000 people have signed up for the service, with around 8 million shillings transferred so far, mostly in tiny denominations. Safaricom’s executives are confident that growth will be strong in Kenya, and later across Africa. “We are effectively giving people ATM cards without them ever having to open a real bank account,” said Michael Joseph, chief executive of Safaricom, who called the money transfer concept the “next big thing” in mobile telephony.
C. M-Pesa’s is simple. There is no need for a new handset or SIM card. To send money, you hand over the cash to a registered agent - typically a retailer - who credits your virtual account. You then send between 100 shillings (74p) and 35,000 shillings (£259) via text message to the desired recipient - even someone on a different mobile network - who cashes it at an agent by entering a secret code and showing ID. A commission of up to 170 shillings (£1.25) is paid by the recipient but it compares favourably with fees levied by the major banks, whose services are too expensive for most of the population.
D. Mobile phone growth in Kenya, as in most of Africa, has been remarkable, even among the rural poor. In June 1999, Kenya had 15,000 mobile subscribers. Today, it has nearly 8 million out of a population of 35 million, and the two operators’ networks are as extensive as the access to banks is limited. Safaricom says it is not so much competing with financial services companies as filling a void. In time, M-Pesa will allow people to borrow and repay money, and make purchases. Companies will be able to pay salaries directly into workers’ phones - something that has already attracted the interest of larger employers, such as the tea companies, whose workers often have to be paid in cash as they do not have bank accounts. There are concerns about security, but Safaricom insists that even if someone’s phone is stolen, the PIN system prevents unauthorised withdrawals. Mr. Joseph said the only danger is sending cash to the wrong mobile number and the recipient redeeming it straight away.
E. The project is being watched closely by mobile operators around the world as a way of targeting the multibillion pound international cash transfer industry long dominated by companies such as Western Union and Moneygram. Remittances sent from nearly 200 million migrant workers to developing countries totalled £102 billion last year, according to the World Bank. The GSM Association, which represents more than 700 mobile operators worldwide, believes this could quadruple by 2012 if transfers by SMS become the norm. Vodafone has entered a partnership with Citigroup that will soon allow Kenyans in the UK to send money home via text message. The charge for sending £50 is expected to be about £3, less than a third of what some traditional services charge.
  1. 1

    A possible security problem

  2. 2

    The cost of M-Pesa

  3. 3

    An international service similar to M-Pesa

  4. 4

    The fact that most Kenyans do not have a bank account

  5. 5

    Safaricom is the ________ mobile phone company in Kenya.

  6. 6

    An M-Pesa account needs to be credited by ___________

  7. 7

    __________ companies are particularly interested in using M-Pesa.

  8. 8

    Companies like Moneygram and Western Union have ___________ the international money transfer market.

  9. 9

    Most Kenyans working in urban areas have relatives in rural areas.

    • TRUE. TRUE
    • FALSE. FALSE
    • NOT GIVEN. NOT GIVEN
  10. 10

    So far, most of the people using M-Pesa have used it to send small amounts of money.

  11. 11

    M-Pesa can only be used by people using one phone network.

  12. 12

    M-Pesa can be used to buy products and services.

  13. 13

    The GSM Association is a consumer organisation.

Reading Passage 2: Babies Cry in Their Mother Tongue

A newborn baby's cry may sound the same to the ears of sleep-deprived parents the world over but, say scientists, comparisons of babies a few days old show that the cry of a newborn shares similarities with the language its parents speak. The reason for this is presumably the different intonation patterns in their native languages, which are already perceived in the uterus and are later reproduced.
A It is already known that human foetuses become attentive listeners in the final trimester of pregnancy. The mother's voice in particular is sensed early on, explains Professor Amelia Finlayson of the Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences in Leipzig. 'Human foetuses perceive information filtered at around 400 hertz, but they cannot hear the actual words. It is a bit like holding your head under water when someone is talking next to the bath.'
B Finlayson's research indicates that newborn babies probably cannot distinguish between the accents of Welsh and Northern Scottish people or between Low German and Upper Bavarian, but they can recognise major differences in the intonation patterns of their respective mother tongues. The Leipzig researchers showed that in an earlier experiment, by means of physiological studies of babies of three to four months of age. For that study, the babies had hoops with electrodes put on their heads, and had recordings of different intonation patterns played to them. The children's brainwaves reacted to the differences even when they were asleep.
C In the most recent study, published in the journal Current Biology, Finlayson and her colleagues recorded and analysed the cries of 60 healthy newborns: 30 born into French-speaking families and 30 born into German-speaking families. All babies were between three and five days old. The recordings were made in Paris and Leipzig. The analysis revealed a striking difference. French newborns cried with a rising, falling intonation pattern – from high to low and back to high – while German newborns cried with a falling intonation pattern. These patterns mirror the characteristic intonation contours of the French and German languages respectively.
D Why would a baby cry with the melody of its mother tongue? The researchers suggest that this ability is learned before birth. Human foetuses begin to hear around the 26th week of pregnancy. They cannot hear individual sounds or words because they are muffled by the surrounding amniotic fluid and maternal tissue, but they can perceive the rhythm, stress and intonation patterns of their mother's voice. This early exposure enables them to produce similar patterns in their first vocalisations – their cries.
E The findings have implications for our understanding of early language acquisition. 'We have known for some time that infants are active listeners and learners from the first moments of life,' says Finlayson. 'What we have now shown is that this learning begins before birth. The foetus is not a passive recipient of sensory information but an active processor, already tuning itself to the specific features of its native language environment.'
F A follow-up experiment tested whether this early tuning serves a functional purpose. The researchers played recordings of French and German baby cries to a group of 40 mothers (20 French, 20 German). The mothers were asked to identify which cry came from a baby of their own language group. Remarkably, both French and German mothers correctly identified their own language group's cries at rates significantly above chance. 'This suggests that the cry melody acts as a signal,' explains Finlayson. 'It may help to strengthen the bond between mother and infant and to elicit more rapid caregiving responses.'
G Professor Hendrik van der Meer, a developmental psychologist at the University of Amsterdam who was not involved in the study, calls the findings 'provocative and important'. He notes, however, that the sample size was relatively small and that the results should be replicated with other language pairs, such as tonal languages like Mandarin Chinese or pitch-accent languages like Japanese. 'Nevertheless,' he adds, 'this study provides compelling evidence that human vocal learning begins earlier than previously believed – not after birth, but before it.'
H Other researchers have speculated that this early imitation may be driven by a primitive survival mechanism. Babies who produce cries that resonate with their mothers may receive faster responses, including feeding and comfort. Over time, this would favour the development of such cry patterns through natural selection. 'The baby who can best signal its needs to its mother has an evolutionary advantage,' says van der Meer. 'Crying in the mother's tongue may be the first and most fundamental act of social communication.'
  1. 14

    a description of the methodology of an experiment carried out by several research institutes

  2. 15

    the rationale for choosing the participants of an experiment

  3. 16

    a suggestion that babies are driven to copy their mothers to gain food

  4. 17

    an account of the methodology of a past experiment carried out by the Leipzig researchers

  5. 18

    an illustration of the limitation of babies' ability to hear inside the womb

  6. 19

    an assertion that babies of different nationalities cry with different intonation

  7. 20

    The foetus actively prepares itself for its native language environment while still in the womb.

    • A. Professor Amelia Finlayson
    • B. Professor Hendrik van der Meer
    • C. Both Professor Amelia Finlayson and Professor Hendrik van der Meer
    • D. Neither Professor Amelia Finlayson nor Professor Hendrik van der Meer
  8. 21

    The findings of the study need to be confirmed with other types of languages.

  9. 22

    Mothers can distinguish the cries of babies from their own language group.

  10. 23

    The sample size used in the study was relatively small.

  11. 24

    Complete the summary below. Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer. Early language learning before birth Human foetuses begin to hear during the final months of pregnancy. Although they cannot detect individual words because the sounds are dulled by amniotic fluid and maternal tissue, they can perceive the _______________, stress and intonation of their mother's voice. This early exposure allows newborns to produce similar patterns in their first vocalisations. In a study comparing French and German newborns, the cries of each group reflected the characteristic 25 _______________ patterns of their respective mother tongues. Researchers suggest that this ability may give babies an evolutionary advantage, as mothers who recognise their own baby's cry may respond more quickly with 26 _______________ and comfort.

Reading Passage 3: The Placebo Effect

With the right encouragement, your mind can convince the body to heal itself. What is the mysterious force that can do this?
Want to devise a new form of alternative medical treatment? No problem. Here’s the recipe. As a practitioner, be warm, sympathetic, reassuring and enthusiastic. Your treatment should involve physical contact, and each session with your patients should take at least half an hour. Encourage your patients to take an active part in their treatment and understand how their disorders relate to the rest of their lives. Tell them that their own bodies possess the true power to heal. Get them to pay you well. Describe your treatment in familiar words, but embroidered with a hint of mysticism: energy fields, energy flows, energy blocks, meridians, forces, auras, rhythms and the like. Refer to the knowledge of an earlier age: wisdom carelessly swept aside by the rise of blind mechanistic science. Oh, come off it, you’re saying. Something like that couldn’t possibly work, could it?
Well, yes, it could and often well enough to earn you a living. And a very good living if you are sufficiently convincing or, better still, really believe in your therapy. Many illnesses get better on their own, so if you are lucky and administer your treatment at just the right time you’ll get the credit. But that’s only part of it. Some of the improvement really would be down to you. Not necessarily because you’d recommended ginseng rather than chamomile tea or used this crystal as opposed to that pressure point. Nothing so specific. Your healing power would be the outcome of a paradoxical force that conventional medicine recognizes but remains oddly ambivalent about: the placebo effect.
Placebos are treatments that have no direct effect on the body, yet still work because the patient has faith in their power to heal. Most often the term refers to a dummy pill, but it applies just as much to any device or procedure, from a sticking plaster to a crystal. The existence of the placebo effect implies that even a complete fraud could make a difference to someone’s health, which is why some practitioners of alternative medicine are sensitive about any mention of the subject. In fact, the placebo is a powerful part of all medical care, orthodox or otherwise, though its role is often neglected and misunderstood.
At one level, it should come as no surprise that our state of mind can influence our physiology: anger opens the superficial blood vessels of the face; sadness pumps the tear glands. But exactly how placebos work their medical magic is still largely unknown. Most of the scant research to date has focused on the control of pain, because it’s one of the commonest complaints and lends itself to experimental study. Here, attention has turned to the endorphins, natural substances produced in the brain that are known to help control pain. Any of the neurochemicals involved in transmitting pain impulses or modulating them might also be involved in generating the placebo response, says Don Price, an oral surgeon at the University of Florida.
That case has been strengthened by the recent work of Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin, who showed that the placebo effect can be abolished by a drug, naloxone, which blocks the effects of endorphins. Benedetti induced pain in a pressure cuff on the forearm. He did this several times a day for several days, using morphine each time to control the pain. On the final day, without saying anything, he replaced the morphine with a saline solution. This still relieved the subjects’ pain: a placebo effect. But when he added naloxone to the saline, and blocked the endorphins, the pain relief disappeared. Here was direct proof that the relief of pain by a placebo is carried out, at least in part, by these natural opiates.
Though scientists don’t know exactly how placebos work, they have accumulated a fair bit of knowledge about how to trigger the effect. A London rheumatologist found, for example, that red dummy capsules made more effective painkillers than blue, green or yellow ones. Research on American students revealed that blue pills make better tranquillisers than pink, a colour more suitable for stimulants. Even branding can make a difference: if Aspro or Tylenol are what you like to take for a headache; their chemically identical generic equivalents may be less effective.
It matters too how the treatment is delivered. Decades ago, when the major tranquilliser chlorpromazine was being introduced, a doctor in Kansas categorised his colleagues according to whether they were keen on it, openly sceptical of its benefits, or took a let’s-try-and-see attitude. His conclusion: the more enthusiastic the doctor, the better the drug performed. A recent survey by Ernst on doctors’ bedside manners turned up one consistent finding: physicians who adopt a warm, friendly, reassuring manner are more effective than those whose consultations are formal and do not offer reassurance.
Warm, friendly and reassuring are precisely what alternative treatment is all about, of course. Many of the ingredients of that opening recipe — the physical contact, the generous swaths of time, the strong hints of supernormal healing power — are just the kind of thing likely to impress patients. It’s hardly surprising then, that complementary practitioners are generally best at mobilising the placebo effect, says Arthur Kleinman, professor of social anthropology at Harvard University.
  1. 25

    An appointment with an alternative practitioner

    • A. should be easy to understand
    • B. can improve without treatment
    • C. can cost the patient less
    • D. ought to last a minimum length of time
    • E. can require a range of different products
    • F. can be described as serious
    • G. should give it greater recognition
    • H. should be able to get a high income
  2. 26

    An alternative practitioner’s explanation of their treatment

  3. 27

    If alternative practitioners have faith in their treatment, they

  4. 28

    Quite often, a patient’s illness

  5. 29

    Conventional doctors are aware of the placebo effect and they

  6. 30

    In the third paragraph, the writer says that the placebo effect

    • A. works best in tablet form.
    • B. is a new type of medical treatment.
    • C. is trusted more by some patients than by others.
    • D. has a significant role in both alternative and conventional medicine.
  7. 31

    A reference is made to anger and sadness in order to show that

    • A. personal feelings can alter our physical condition.
    • B. some human behaviour has no clear explanation.
    • C. placebos, like emotions, are experienced by everyone.
    • D. people find some physical reactions hard to control.
  8. 32

    Research on pain control attracts most of the attention because

    • A. Only a limited amount of research has been conducted so far.
    • B. Scientists have discovered that endorphins can help to reduce pain.
    • C. Pain-reducing agents might also be involved in the placebo effect.
    • D. Patients often experience pain and like to complain about it.
  9. 33

    Scientists now have enough information to understand how the placebo effect becomes active in people.

  10. 34

    As a result of experiments, some painkillers have been taken off the market.

  11. 35

    Individual preference can have an impact on the effectiveness of different brands of headache tablets.

  12. 36

    Doctors expressed a range of views on the drug chlorpromazine when it was first introduced.

  13. 37

    Ernst’s study had a big influence on doctors’ behaviour with patients.

  14. 38

    Alternative practitioners work in a way that is likely to trigger the placebo effect.

Answer sheet

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Answer key

  1. 1. D

    D is correct because the passage mentions that a possible security problem is people sending money to the wrong number, which could result in loss of funds.

  2. 2. C

    C is correct because the passage states that M-Pesa is much cheaper than traditional banking or money transfer services.

  3. 3. E

    E is correct because the passage compares M-Pesa to international services like Moneygram and Western Union.

  4. 4. A

    A is correct because the passage says most Kenyans do not have a bank account, which is why M-Pesa is so popular.

  5. 5. biggest

    'Biggest' is correct because the passage says Safaricom is the largest mobile phone company in Kenya.

  6. 6. an agent / a registered agent

    'An agent' or 'a registered agent' is correct because the passage explains that to use M-Pesa, you must first credit your account through an agent.

  7. 7. Tea

    'Tea' is correct because the passage mentions that tea companies are especially interested in using M-Pesa to pay their workers.

  8. 8. long dominated

    'Long dominated' is correct because the passage says companies like Moneygram and Western Union have controlled the international money transfer market for a long time.

  9. 9. NOT GIVEN

    NOT GIVEN is correct because the passage does not say whether most Kenyans working in cities have relatives in rural areas.

  10. 10. TRUE

    TRUE is correct because the passage says most people have used M-Pesa to send small amounts of money.

  11. 11. FALSE

    FALSE is correct because the passage says M-Pesa can be used by people on different phone networks, not just one.

  12. 12. FALSE

    FALSE is correct because the passage says M-Pesa cannot yet be used to buy products and services.

  13. 13. FALSE

    FALSE is correct because the passage says the GSM Association is an industry group, not a consumer organisation.

  14. 14. C

    C is correct because the passage describes the methodology of an experiment carried out by several research institutes.

  15. 15. C

    C is correct because the passage explains why the researchers chose the participants for their experiment.

  16. 16. H

    H is correct because the passage suggests that babies may copy their mothers' cries to get food.

  17. 17. B

    B is correct because the passage gives details about how the Leipzig researchers did their past experiment.

  18. 18. A

    A is correct because the passage explains that babies cannot hear individual words inside the womb due to the amniotic fluid and tissue.

  19. 19. C

    C is correct because the passage says babies from different countries cry with different intonation patterns.

  20. 20. A

    A is correct because only Professor Amelia Finlayson says the foetus prepares for its native language environment in the womb.

  21. 21. B

    B is correct because Professor Hendrik van der Meer says the findings need to be confirmed with other types of languages.

  22. 22. A

    A is correct because Professor Amelia Finlayson says mothers can tell the cries of babies from their own language group.

  23. 23. B

    B is correct because Professor Hendrik van der Meer mentions that the sample size was small.

  24. 24. rhythm / intonation / feeding

    'Rhythm' or 'intonation' is correct because the passage says babies can hear the rhythm and intonation of their mother's voice. 'Feeding' is correct because the passage says mothers may respond quickly with feeding and comfort.

  25. 25. D

    D is correct because the passage says an appointment with an alternative practitioner should last a minimum length of time.

  26. 26. A

    A is correct because the passage says the explanation of treatment should be easy to understand.

  27. 27. H

    H is correct because the passage says practitioners who believe in their treatment should be able to get a high income.

  28. 28. B

    B is correct because the passage says sometimes a patient's illness can improve without treatment.

  29. 29. G

    G is correct because the passage says conventional doctors know about the placebo effect and think it should be recognised more.

  30. 30. D

    D is correct because the passage says the placebo effect is important in both alternative and conventional medicine. The tempting wrong answer C fails because the passage does not say trust is the main difference.

  31. 31. A

    A is correct because the passage mentions anger and sadness to show that feelings can change our physical health.

  32. 32. D

    D is correct because the passage says pain control gets attention because patients often have pain and complain about it. The tempting wrong answer C fails because the passage does not say this is the main reason.

  33. 33. NO

    NO is correct because the passage says scientists do not yet fully understand how the placebo effect works.

  34. 34. NOT GIVEN

    NOT GIVEN is correct because the passage does not mention any painkillers being taken off the market due to experiments.

  35. 35. YES

    YES is correct because the passage says people’s preferences can affect how well different brands of headache tablets work for them.

  36. 36. YES

    YES is correct because the passage says doctors had different opinions about chlorpromazine when it was first used.

  37. 37. NOT GIVEN

    NOT GIVEN is correct because the passage does not say whether Ernst’s study changed doctors’ behaviour.

  38. 38. YES

    YES is correct because the passage says alternative practitioners work in ways that are likely to trigger the placebo effect.

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Reading 2026-07 Test 16 — IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test with Answers | Ieltsa