Exam Reading Practice
Exam Reading Practice offers longer academic passages (CEFR B2–C1) with the question types used in the IELTS and TOEFL reading sections: True / False / Not Given, matching headings, and summary completion. Every set is exam-style practice written by ESLDesk — not official exam questions — and each one is free, with answers and explanations on the page.
CEFR B2–C1 · 10 passages · US English
-
Why beekeeping has spread into cities, how urban hives differ from rural ones, rooftop colonies, and the debate over wild pollinators.
-
The 1880s safety bicycle, its social impact, its decline in the car era, and the modern return of bike lanes and bike-share systems.
-
Why usable fresh water is rare on a water-covered planet, and how desalination, recycling, fog nets, and conservation supply it.
-
The urban heat island effect: why city centers run hotter than the countryside, what it costs, and how cool roofs and trees fight back.
-
How stacked indoor farms grow greens with LED light and hydroponics, why energy costs limit them to salad crops, and where the model pays off.
-
A corroded bronze lump from a 1901 Greek shipwreck proved to be a geared astronomical computer that rewrote the history of ancient science.
-
An academic look at deep-sea bioluminescence: the luciferin chemistry, its uses for hunting, camouflage, and signaling, and its laboratory applications.
-
How inert pills can heal or harm: the history of the placebo effect, its brain chemistry, blinded drug trials, and the ethics of honest placebos.
-
Why a large share of the world’s 7,000 languages face extinction, what dies with them, and how Hebrew, Welsh, and Maori were revived.
-
How railways and the telegraph replaced local solar time with Greenwich-based zones, from the 1884 Meridian Conference to atomic clocks and UTC.