IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 2
The failure of the smart city, why sleep was industrialised, and the limits of tree planting.
Free, no sign-up. Written in the Cambridge style — same structure, same mark split, same trap patterns — with original passages. Answer a passage, mark it, and read why each wrong option was tempting. The full answer key is on its own page — open it after you finish, not before.
What Happened to the Smart City
Passage 1 of 3 · 13 marks
Around 2010, a particular vision of the urban future became briefly unavoidable. Cities would be instrumented with sensors, their traffic lights and water pipes and rubbish bins reporting continuously to a central dashboard, and algorithms would tune the whole system towards efficiency. Technology companies produced elaborate renderings of these places, and several governments committed substantial budgets to building them from nothing. A decade and a half later, almost none of the flagship projects exist in the form announced.
The most instructive failure is Songdo, built on reclaimed land near Seoul as a purpose-designed smart district. Its technical systems largely worked: waste was collected pneumatically, buildings reported their own energy use, and residents had video links in their apartments. What the plans had not specified was why anyone would want to live there. Occupancy stayed far below projection for years, and the district acquired a reputation for emptiness that its infrastructure could do nothing about.
A second lesson came from a proposed waterfront development in Toronto, abandoned in 2020. The technology was ambitious and the design widely admired, but the project foundered on a question the renderings had not addressed: who would own the data the district generated, and under what terms. Residents' groups asked it early and persistently, and no answer emerged that satisfied both the developer and the city. The withdrawal was announced as a commercial decision, though the governance dispute had by then run for two years.
What both cases suggest is that the binding constraint on urban improvement was never sensing. Cities have collected data for a century — census returns, traffic counts, water flows — and the difficulty has consistently been institutional rather than informational. A municipality that knows precisely where its buses are delayed still needs the legal authority, the budget and the political consent to change the road layout. Adding a sensor changes none of those three.
This is not an argument that the technology was useless. Cities that quietly applied it to a specific, bounded problem often did well. Sensor networks that detect water-main leaks have paid for themselves repeatedly. Adaptive traffic signals reduce delay at particular junctions. Predictive maintenance on lifts and pumps cuts costs measurably. None of these interventions required a citywide dashboard, and none of them made a compelling rendering.
The vocabulary has shifted accordingly. Where a city authority once announced a smart city strategy, it now more often announces a data governance framework, or a set of digital service standards. This sounds like retreat and is closer to maturity: the useful questions turn out to be about consent, procurement and who is accountable when a system fails, rather than about how much of a city can be measured at once.
List of Headings
“Around 2010, a particular vision of the urban future became briefly unavoidable.”
“The most instructive failure is Songdo, built on reclaimed land near Seoul.”
“A second lesson came from a proposed waterfront development in Toronto.”
“What both cases suggest is that the binding constraint was never sensing.”
“This is not an argument that the technology was useless.”
“The vocabulary has shifted accordingly.”
“Most of the flagship smart city projects were completed as originally announced.”
“Songdo's pneumatic waste collection system did not function properly.”
“The Toronto project was abandoned before the governance dispute began.”
“Cities began collecting data about themselves only after sensors became cheap.”
“Water-main leak detection systems have repaid their cost more than once.”
“The successful applications of the technology required citywide dashboards.”
“Songdo now has higher occupancy than originally projected.”
Marks all 40 questions at once and converts the total on the official table. Unanswered questions count as wrong, as they do on test day.
About this test
How many questions are in IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 2?
40, across three passages, split 13 + 13 + 14 exactly as the real Academic Reading paper is. You have 60 minutes for all three with no extra transfer time.
Do I need an account to take this test?
No. Read the passages, answer, and get each passage marked without signing in. A free account adds saved history and per-question-type band tracking.
Where are the answers?
On a separate page — the answer key for this test lists every correct answer, the exact line of the passage that proves it, and the trap behind each wrong option.
Is this a Cambridge IELTS test?
It is written in the Cambridge style, not taken from a Cambridge volume: the same three-passage structure, the same 13 + 13 + 14 mark split, the same passage lengths and register, and question types drawn from the same eleven with the same trap patterns. Original texts built to that specification — nobody can legally hand you a scanned past paper.