Henry Moore was born in Castleford, a small town near Leeds in the north of England. He was the seventh child of Raymond Moore and his wife Mary Baker. He studied at Castleford Grammar School from 1909 to 1915, where his early interest in art was encouraged by his teacher Alice Gostick. After leaving school, …
Henry Moore (1898-1986) – IELTS Academic Reading Passage Read More »
Humans start developing a sense of humour as early as six weeks old, when babies begin to laugh and smile in response to stimuli. Laughter is universal across all human cultures and even exists in some form in rats, chimps, and bonobos. Like other human emotions and expressions, laughter and humour provide psychological scientists with …
A The passenger pigeon was a legendary species. Flying in vast numbers across North America, with potentially many millions within a single flock, their migration was once one of nature’s great spectacles. Sadly, the passenger pigeon’s existence came to an end on 1 September 1914, when the last living specimen died at Cincinnati Zoo. Geneticist Ben …
Should we try to bring extinct species back to life? – IELTS Academic Reading Passage Read More »
A The way we travel around cities has a major impact on whether they are sustainable. Transportation is estimated to account for 30% of energy consumption in most of the world’s most developed nations, so lowering the need for energy-using vehicles is essential for decreasing the environmental impact of mobility. But as more and more people …
Could urban engineers learn from dance?- IELTS Academic Reading Passage Read More »
A speech dysfluency is any of various breaks, irregularities or sound-filled pauses that we make when we are speaking, which are commonly known as fillers. These include words and sentences that are not finished, repeated phrases or syllables, instances of speakers correcting their own mistakes as they speak and “words” such as ‘huh’, ‘uh’, ‘erm’, …
SPEECH DYSFLUENCY AND POPULAR FILLERS – IELTS Academic Reading Passage Read More »
A The body is made up mainly of water. This means that the quality of water that we drink every day has an important effect on our health. Filtered water is healthier than tap water and some bottled water. This is because it is free of contaminants, that is, of substances that make it dirty or …
DRINKING FILTERED WATER – IELTS Academic Reading Passage Read More »
Albert Einstein is perhaps the best-known scientist of the 20th century. He received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1921 and his theories of special and general relativity are of great importance to many branches of physics and astronomy. He is well known for his theories about light, matter, gravity, space and time. His most …
ALBERT EINSTEIN – IELTS Academic Reading Passage Read More »
‘Bedlam’ is a word that has become synonymous in the English language with chaos and disorder. The term itself derives from the shortened name for a former 16th century London institution for the mentally ill, known as St. Mary of Bethlehem. This institution was so notorious that its name was to become a byword for …
Care in the Community – IELTS Academic Reading Passage Read More »
A In their first years of studying mathematics at school, children all over the world usually have to learn the times table, also known as the multiplication table, which shows what you get when you multiply numbers together. Children have traditionally learned their times table by going from ‘1 times 1 is 1′ all the way …
TRICKY SUMS AND PSYCHOLOGY – IELTS Academic Reading Passage Read More »
Everyone daydreams sometimes. We sit or lie down, close our eyes and use our imagination to think about something that might happen in the future or could have happened in the past. Most daydreaming is pleasant. We would like the daydream to happen and we would be very happy if it did actually happen. We …
