IELTS Academic Reading Practice Test 6
Dating the past from tree rings, the footbridge that taught engineers about crowds, and the case against originality.
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.
Reading the Rings of Trees
Passage 1 of 3 · 13 marks
Anyone who has looked at a cut stump knows that a tree adds a ring each year, and that counting the rings gives its age. What is less widely known is that the rings vary in width, and that the pattern of wide and narrow years is shared by every tree growing in the same climate at the same time. That shared pattern is a signature, and it is the basis of an entire dating method.
The technique was worked out in Arizona in the early twentieth century by an astronomer who was studying sunspots and wanted a long record of climate. Andrew Douglass realised that if a living tree cut today carries a pattern reaching back four hundred years, and a beam from an old building carries a pattern that overlaps the earlier part of it, the two can be joined. Repeating that overlap across many samples extends the record far beyond the life of any single tree.
The method's precision is its distinguishing feature and its limitation. A well-crossdated sample is accurate to the exact calendar year, which radiocarbon dating cannot approach, and in favourable cases to the season within that year. But the pattern must match a reference chronology built for that species and that region, and where no such chronology exists the sample cannot be dated at all, however well preserved it is.
Its uses have spread well beyond archaeology. Rings record drought, fire scars, insect outbreaks and volcanic dust years, so a forest is also an archive of the disturbances it survived. Art historians date the wooden panels beneath paintings and have occasionally shown that a panel was felled after the artist died. Instrument makers have used it on violins, with results that were not always welcome to their owners.
The most contested application is climate reconstruction. Ring width responds to temperature in some settings and to rainfall in others, and disentangling the two requires assumptions that are themselves debated. Where the relationship between rings and measured temperature holds for the early part of the instrumental record and weakens later, the divergence is real, unexplained, and a reason for treating any single reconstruction with caution.
List of Headings
“Anyone who has looked at a cut stump knows that a tree adds a ring each year.”
“The technique was worked out in Arizona in the early twentieth century.”
“The method's precision is its distinguishing feature and its limitation.”
“Its uses have spread well beyond archaeology.”
“The most contested application is climate reconstruction.”
“Douglass developed the technique while researching sunspots.”
“Radiocarbon dating can identify the exact calendar year of a sample.”
“A sample can always be dated provided the wood is well preserved.”
“Ring dating has proved that several well-known violins are forgeries.”
Answer the questions below. Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for each answer.
No more than 3 words from the passage
Besides drought, fire scars and volcanic dust years, what do rings record?
In favourable cases, ring dating can pinpoint what within a year?
What must a sample be matched against before it can be dated?
What term does the passage use for the weakening link between rings and measured temperature?
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 6?
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.