IELTS Reading Library
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Full IELTS Reading papers, with the reason for every answer.

Two complete Academic Reading papers, written to the Cambridge specification and sat in a timed split-screen exactly as the computer-delivered test presents it. Every one of the 40 questions comes back with the paragraph the answer lives in and an explanation of why each wrong option was placed where it was.

2 full papers 80 explained questions 11 question types covered 60 minutes each
01

Sit a paper

02

What these are, and what they are not

Original passages

Every passage here was written for this site. These are not scanned Cambridge past papers. Nobody may lawfully hand you one of those, and a site offering them is distributing someone else's copyright.

Built to the published specification

Three passages of 2,150–2,750 words rising in difficulty, 40 marks split 13 + 13 + 14, sixty minutes with no transfer time, and question types drawn from the same eleven the real paper uses.

The traps are the point

A wrong answer in Reading is rarely a failure to understand English. It is a mechanism someone placed there. Each item here was written to a named pattern, and the answer page tells you which one it was.

The band is an estimate

Scores convert through the standard Academic table. But a real paper is pre-tested on thousands of candidates and these have not been, so read the band as a position, not a prediction.

03

How to use them

Sit one paper under the clock, without stopping. Then read the answer page in full — including the items you got right, because a right answer for the wrong reason will fail next time.
Then do the thing almost nobody does: write down which pattern each lost mark belonged to. Two or three patterns will account for most of the damage. Sitting more whole papers without that step preserves the weakness rather than fixing it — the mix hides which type is failing.