Band 8+ Academic Reading Practice Test 1
How mixed populations invent accents, what living things cost in thermodynamic terms, and when an expert is worth trusting.
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.
Why Cities Have Accents
Passage 1 of 3 · 13 marks
A city that draws its population from many places might be expected to produce speech that averages them out, and it does not. Large migrations into industrial cities in the nineteenth century produced, within two or three generations, varieties as distinct from their sources as the sources were from each other. The mechanism by which a mixed population converges on something new rather than on a compromise is one of the better-documented and less intuitive findings in the study of language.
The first stage is levelling, and it is largely subtractive. Features that mark a speaker as coming from one particular place, and that other speakers find hard to reproduce or hear as marked, tend to be dropped within a generation. What survives is not the average of the inputs but the subset that is either shared by many varieties or perceptually neutral, which means the outcome is already skewed before anything new has been created.
The second stage supplies what the first removed. Children acquiring a language from a mixed adult input do not select randomly among the variants they hear; they regularise, extending a pattern to cases where no adult applies it, and they occasionally settle on a variant that was rare in the input because it was structurally simpler. This is the point at which a new variety acquires features that none of its sources possessed, and it is a matter of acquisition rather than of contact.
Identity then does the work of stabilising the result. Once a variety is associated with a place and a set of people, using it becomes a claim about who the speaker is, and that claim is made most strongly by those with most at stake in it. Studies of adolescent speech repeatedly find the sharpest local features not in the most isolated speakers but in those most invested in local networks, which is why prediction from geography alone performs badly.
The commonest mistake in interpreting all this is to treat the outcome as decay. A variety that has lost a distinction its parent had has not lost precision, since the distinction is generally recoverable from context or has been replaced by another mechanism, and the varieties concerned develop distinctions of their own that the standard lacks. What changes is which features carry information, not how much information the system can carry.
The practical consequence is that dialect levelling and dialect creation are the same process observed at different stages, and describing a region as losing its accents therefore reports the first half of a sentence. Whether the second half is visible depends almost entirely on how long the observer has been watching, and most popular commentary is written on a timescale shorter than the phenomenon it describes.
Which paragraph contains the following information? Write the correct letter, A–F. You may use any letter once only.
a reason why predicting speech features from location works badly
the claim that two apparently opposite processes are one process
an account of features being lost rather than gained
the stage at which entirely new features appear
an argument that a change does not reduce precision
the observation that mixed populations do not produce an average
“Nineteenth-century industrial cities developed speech varieties unlike those of the populations that moved into them.”
“Levelling eliminates the features that many varieties have in common.”
“Children acquire the emerging variety faster than adults do.”
“The strongest local features are found among the most isolated adolescent speakers.”
Complete the summary below. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.
Word limit: 2 words
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 Band 8+ Academic Reading Practice Test 1?
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.