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Band 8+ Academic Reading Practice Test 2: Answers & Explanations

All 40 answers below, each with the exact line of the passage that proves it and the reason the tempting wrong option was tempting. If you have not sat the test yet, do that first — a key read before the attempt teaches nothing.

Passage 1: Measuring the Cost of Living

13 marks

Answer key and explanations for passage 1
QAnswerEvidence in the passageWhy, and the trap
Paragraph Ai — A measurement built out of choices“A price index appears to be an act of observation and is in fact a series of decisions.”The basket, the weights and the treatment of change "are all chosen" — a measurement built out of choices.
Paragraph Bii — What happens when shoppers switch products“The first difficulty is that people respond to prices.”Beef and chicken: substitution, and what each formula does with it.
Paragraph Ciii — Separating a price change from a quality change“Quality is harder still, and it is where the largest disagreements live.”Regression on characteristics, and where it works and fails — separating price from quality.
Paragraph Div — Products that arrive too late to be measured“New goods enter the index late, and the delay is not neutral.”Goods join once established, after the steep early price fall has already occurred.
Paragraph Ev — Why the figure is written into contracts“The stakes are not academic, because the number is wired into contracts.”Pensions, wages, tax thresholds and index-linked debt all move with the number.
Paragraph Fvi — One instrument, and the questions it cannot answer“The reasonable conclusion is not that the index is unreliable.”A specific instrument for a specific question, unable to describe a pensioner's or a student's costs.
7overstates“records the full rise in beef and overstates what households actually experienced”One word; the verb must stay in its third-person form.
8regression“using regression on product characteristics”One word naming the technique.
9Medical“Medical care is the standard example of the second case”One word; capitalisation follows the position in the sentence.
10percentage point“the index overstated inflation by about a percentage point”Two words, exactly at the limit.
11NOT GIVEN“Statistical agencies sit between these, and the choice of formula moves the published figure by a few tenths of a point every year”The passage says agencies sit between the two extremes and that the choice matters, but makes no claim about whether countries have converged on one formula.Trap: Outside Text
12FALSE“the corrections proposed have been contested by other economists”The corrections are explicitly described as contested, which contradicts agreement.Trap: Extreme Language
13TRUE“Publishing several indices for identifiable groups would answer more questions honestly”The final sentence recommends exactly this, in preference to refining a single number.

Passage 2: How Resistance Spreads Sideways

13 marks

Answer key and explanations for passage 2
QAnswerEvidence in the passageWhy, and the trap
14B — It is correct as far as it goes but omits a faster route.“That picture is accurate and incomplete.”"Accurate and incomplete", followed by the faster horizontal route. A: The passage calls the picture accurate, then adds to it. C: No such restriction is stated; conjugation is presented as widespread. D: The passage never quantifies which route accounts for most clinical resistance.
15B — Several resistances travel together, so any one drug maintains the rest.“Selection pressure applied by any one of those drugs then maintains resistance to all of them”The plasmid is "a package rather than a gene", so one drug sustains resistance to all of them. A: Mutation is the slow route the passage contrasts with transfer; it is not the reason given here. C: The passage makes no claim that plasmids are never lost. D: Nothing restricts conjugation to periods of drug use.
16C — They long predate antibiotics, so medicine sampled a pool it did not create.“medical use did not create these genes but sampled an existing pool and rewarded the sample heavily”Stated at the end of paragraph D. A: They "predate antibiotic manufacture by a long margin". B: Permafrost is where such genes have been recovered, which is not a claim about where they were first identified. D: Their original function was competition among soil organisms.
17C — The difficulty of proving individual cases has been exploited by both sides.“the difficulty has been used, in both directions, to support conclusions the evidence does not carry”"In both directions" is exactly the claim. A: The passage says the evidence does not carry conclusions of this strength. B: The same sentence rules out the opposite conclusion just as firmly. D: No such statement appears; the difficulty is in individual attribution, not in the existence of research.
18Paragraph F“an explanation of why the measures that work are unappealing”Paragraph F: effective measures produce "the absence of a problem that would otherwise have developed".
19Paragraph B“a description of three distinct routes of transfer”Paragraph B: conjugation, transformation and transduction.
20Paragraph D“evidence that resistance genes are extremely old”Paragraph D: permafrost sediments tens of thousands of years old, and caves isolated for millions.
21Paragraph C“the reason one transfer event can confer several resistances”Paragraph C: the plasmid is "a package rather than a gene", carrying four or five resistances.
22Paragraph E“where the greatest quantity of antibiotics is actually used”Paragraph E: "the majority of antibiotic tonnage is administered to livestock".
23a plasmid (also accepted: plasmid)“a plasmid — a small circular piece of DNA independent of the chromosome”The definition follows the dash; one word plus its article.
24naked DNA“a cell takes up naked DNA released by dead neighbours”Two words, exactly as the passage has them.
25permafrost sediments (also accepted: permafrost)“recovered from permafrost sediments tens of thousands of years old”Two words; the age is not part of the answer.
26sub-therapeutic (also accepted: subtherapeutic, sub-therapeutic doses)“much of it at sub-therapeutic doses to promote growth”One hyphenated word; repeating "doses" is still within the limit.

Passage 3: The Ethics of Prediction

14 marks

Answer key and explanations for passage 3
QAnswerEvidence in the passageWhy, and the trap
27NO“It is usually more accurate.”The passage states the reverse in its second sentence and says accuracy is rarely the objection.Trap: Opposite Meaning
28NO“This is not a defect of any particular system; it is arithmetic”The incompatibility is described as arithmetic, applying to any system whatever its design.Trap: Opposite Meaning
29YES“other variables stand in for it: a postcode encodes a great deal”Removing the attribute leaves the pattern, because proxies carry it.
30YES“inconsistency is itself a form of unfairness that attracts far less attention than bias”Stated directly in paragraph F as part of the comparative defence.
31NO“a debate conducted entirely in terms of the model has been aimed at the wrong object”The final clause says the model-centred debate is aimed at the wrong object; the properties that matter belong to the institution.Trap: Opposite Meaning
32rates“cannot in general be satisfied simultaneously when the underlying rates differ between the groups”One word; keep the plural.
33arrest“A model trained on arrest records learns where policing was concentrated”One word, lifted unchanged.
34repayment“declining a loan makes the counterfactual repayment unobservable”One word; "unobservable" is paraphrased in the summary, the gap word is not.
35argued“a reason of the kind that could be argued with”One word; the participle form is required by the sentence.
36auditable“wrong in a stable, documented, auditable way”One word, third in a list of three adjectives.
37the incompatibility of fairness definitions“It means every deployed system makes a choice, whether or not anyone intended one.”Paragraph B: the arithmetic means every system "embodies a choice among fairness definitions whether or not anyone made that choice deliberately".
38the history embedded in training data“It records the decisions of the past rather than the events themselves.”Paragraph C: arrest records record where policing was concentrated as much as where offences occurred.
39feedback between forecast and outcome“It lets a system appear successful while worsening what it measures.”Paragraph D: systems evaluated on outcomes they caused "can appear to perform well while making the situation they measure progressively worse".
40the institution surrounding the system“It determines whether a decision can be challenged and who answers for it.”Paragraph G: contestability, published error rates and accountability are properties of the arrangement, not of the model.

Convert your score out of 40

Count your correct answers across all three passages. There is no penalty for a wrong answer, so an unanswered question and a wrong guess score the same.

IELTS Academic Reading raw score to band score
BandCorrect (of 40)
9.039–40
8.537–38
8.035–36
7.533–34
7.030–32
6.527–29
6.023–26
5.519–22
5.015–18
4.511–14
4.07–10
3.50–6

Academic conversion. General Training Reading is stricter: band 7 needs 34 correct there against 30 here. Both tables are on the Reading band calculator.

Turn the wrong answers into a band