Reading Lab

IELTS Academic Reading Practice Pack 31

A premium Academic Reading set on public water refill systems, subsea data cables, and climate loss-and-damage finance.

Question count

Time allowed

60 min

Passages

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Passage 1

Public Refill Networks and the Return of Urban Drinking Water

Why cities are rediscovering public drinking water infrastructure and why refill networks involve governance, trust, and maintenance rather than hardware alone.

A.A. For much of the twentieth century, drinking water in many cities became paradoxically invisible. Water systems remained among the most important public utilities, yet the ordinary act of obtaining safe water migrated from the shared city into the private tap and, later, into the disposable bottle. In recent years that settlement has been questioned. Municipal refill networks, public fountains, and bottle-filling stations have returned to policy agendas as cities seek to cut plastic waste, reduce heat stress, and make public space more usable. The appeal is obvious, but the challenge is not simply to install more taps. It is to rebuild confidence in water as a visible civic service rather than as a commodity purchased for individual security.

B.B. Advocates often present refill infrastructure as a straightforward environmental fix. If more people can refill bottles, the argument goes, fewer single-use containers will circulate through streets, landfills, and waterways. That logic is partly sound, but it can become too neat. The environmental effect depends on where refill points are placed, whether they function reliably, and whether residents trust them enough to alter ingrained habits. A station hidden in an underused corner or frequently out of order may perform well in procurement reports while doing little in practice. Access must therefore be understood behaviourally, not only spatially.

C.C. Trust is central because public water carries a social history. In some cities, degraded pipes, uneven service, or highly publicised contamination episodes have taught residents that official assurances do not always deserve immediate belief. Elsewhere, bottled water has been marketed so successfully as cleaner, healthier, or more sophisticated that the public fountain is treated as a relic of lower expectations. Refill policy must work against both kinds of inheritance: infrastructural distrust and status distrust. This is why some municipalities now combine installations with visible water-quality reporting, maintenance logs, and design strategies that make cleanliness legible rather than merely promised.

D.D. Distribution also matters. A dense business district may receive stylish refill stations because it attracts tourists and offers reputational value, while peripheral districts remain poorly served even where summer heat and household water insecurity are more severe. In that case, a refill programme can reproduce the inequality it claims to soften. The political test is not whether a city can point to a map full of icons, but whether the network reaches the people whose routines most depend on dependable public provision: outdoor workers, students, transit users, elderly residents, and people spending long periods in public space because private cooling is limited.

E.E. Maintenance is the least glamorous part of the system and often the decisive one. A refill point that leaks, loses pressure, develops an odour, or breaks during hot weather damages confidence beyond the single site. People generalise quickly from failure. For administrators, however, maintenance is difficult because the benefit of routine servicing is the absence of complaint rather than a visible ribbon-cutting moment. The economics therefore reward installation more readily than upkeep. Cities that treat refill infrastructure as a short-term campaign object frequently discover that symbolic abundance can collapse into practical scarcity within a few seasons.

F.F. Some planners also overestimate the power of digital layers. Phone maps showing refill points can be useful, but they cannot compensate for poor siting, weak signage, inaccessible height, or unreliable operation. Nor is every potential user equally able or willing to rely on an app. Tourists, children, elderly residents, and people with limited data access often depend on ordinary wayfinding cues. The most effective refill networks therefore combine data with low-tech clarity: visible placement near routes of movement, understandable signs, and integration with toilets, shade, seating, and other elements of habitable public space.

G.G. The wider significance of refill networks is that they turn a quiet utility back into a public question. Once drinking water is encountered again in streets, stations, schools, and parks, cities have to decide whether hydration is treated as an individual purchasing problem or as part of shared urban welfare. That choice reaches beyond plastic reduction. It touches public health, thermal resilience, and the dignity of being able to remain in public space without repeatedly having to buy permission in liquid form. Refill infrastructure is therefore modest in scale but not in meaning. It asks whether a basic physiological need is being organised through universal provision or through fragmented transactions.

Matching Headings

Questions 1-5

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B-F from the list of headings below.

Write the correct Roman numeral, i-viii, in boxes 1-5.

1. Paragraph B

i. Why digital tools cannot substitute for usable public infrastructure
ii. How an environmental argument becomes weaker when behaviour is ignored
iii. The risk that symbolic installations favour already visible districts
iv. Why routine maintenance lacks political glamour but determines success
v. A historical explanation for why public water disappeared from view
vi. Two different kinds of distrust that refill policy must overcome
vii. A claim that bottle-filling stations automatically reduce urban inequality
viii. The return of hydration as a question of shared welfare

2. Paragraph C

i. Why digital tools cannot substitute for usable public infrastructure
ii. How an environmental argument becomes weaker when behaviour is ignored
iii. The risk that symbolic installations favour already visible districts
iv. Why routine maintenance lacks political glamour but determines success
v. A historical explanation for why public water disappeared from view
vi. Two different kinds of distrust that refill policy must overcome
vii. A claim that bottle-filling stations automatically reduce urban inequality
viii. The return of hydration as a question of shared welfare

3. Paragraph D

i. Why digital tools cannot substitute for usable public infrastructure
ii. How an environmental argument becomes weaker when behaviour is ignored
iii. The risk that symbolic installations favour already visible districts
iv. Why routine maintenance lacks political glamour but determines success
v. A historical explanation for why public water disappeared from view
vi. Two different kinds of distrust that refill policy must overcome
vii. A claim that bottle-filling stations automatically reduce urban inequality
viii. The return of hydration as a question of shared welfare

4. Paragraph E

i. Why digital tools cannot substitute for usable public infrastructure
ii. How an environmental argument becomes weaker when behaviour is ignored
iii. The risk that symbolic installations favour already visible districts
iv. Why routine maintenance lacks political glamour but determines success
v. A historical explanation for why public water disappeared from view
vi. Two different kinds of distrust that refill policy must overcome
vii. A claim that bottle-filling stations automatically reduce urban inequality
viii. The return of hydration as a question of shared welfare

5. Paragraph F

i. Why digital tools cannot substitute for usable public infrastructure
ii. How an environmental argument becomes weaker when behaviour is ignored
iii. The risk that symbolic installations favour already visible districts
iv. Why routine maintenance lacks political glamour but determines success
v. A historical explanation for why public water disappeared from view
vi. Two different kinds of distrust that refill policy must overcome
vii. A claim that bottle-filling stations automatically reduce urban inequality
viii. The return of hydration as a question of shared welfare

True/False/Not Given

Questions 6-9

Do the following statements agree with the information given in Reading Passage 1?

In boxes 6-9, write TRUE if the statement agrees with the information, FALSE if the statement contradicts the information, or NOT GIVEN if there is no information on this.

6. The passage says refill points reduce plastic waste regardless of where they are located.

7. The writer suggests that bottled water has sometimes been associated with social status rather than necessity.

8. According to the passage, every city publishes maintenance logs for individual refill stations.

9. The writer argues that business districts are always less vulnerable to heat than outer districts.

Sentence Completion

Questions 10-13

Complete the sentences below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

10. The passage says public water must be rebuilt as a visible civic ______.

11. Officials may celebrate new installations more readily than routine ______.

12. Not every user can rely on a phone ______ when searching for water.

13. The final paragraph contrasts universal provision with fragmented ______.

Passage 2

Subsea Data Cables and the Geography of Digital Redundancy

Why undersea cables remain the backbone of the internet and why resilience depends on politics, finance, and geography rather than bandwidth alone.

A.A. The popular image of the internet is often atmospheric: clouds, wireless signals, and frictionless flows. Its real geography is harsher and more material. Most international data still travels through fibre-optic cables lying on or beneath the seabed, landing at carefully selected coasts before moving inland through terrestrial networks. Because the system is usually invisible to users, it can seem natural or automatic. In fact it is an engineered compromise among distance, marine conditions, finance, regulation, and geopolitical trust.

B.B. Cable planners do not simply chase the shortest line between two points. Routes are shaped by fishing zones, shipping lanes, seismic risk, seabed topography, permitting regimes, and the location of data centres and exchange points on land. A route that looks elegant on a global map may be unattractive once one adds insurance costs, diplomatic friction, or a difficult landing environment. Redundancy therefore has to be designed. It is not enough to have high capacity if multiple systems converge on the same vulnerable corridor or the same coastal bottleneck.

C.C. This is why recent debates have focused less on raw bandwidth and more on concentration risk. Some island states and peripheral regions depend on only one or two major cable connections. Under normal conditions that arrangement may seem adequate, but a single cut, anchor drag, or equipment fault can then produce prolonged disruption. Engineers have long known this. The difficulty is economic. Redundant routes are expensive, and the commercial return from serving smaller or poorer markets may not justify extra infrastructure without public coordination, concessional finance, or strategic subsidy.

D.D. Ownership structures complicate the picture further. Earlier cable consortia often involved telecommunications carriers sharing costs and capacity. More recently, large cloud and platform companies have funded or co-funded major cable systems to secure traffic, latency control, and direct links between their facilities. This shift has improved investment speed on some routes, but it has also concentrated influence in firms whose priorities may not align perfectly with national resilience planning. A cable that serves global business logic efficiently is not automatically the one that best diversifies a region's strategic exposure.

E.E. Security debates sometimes swing between complacency and melodrama. It is true that cables can be damaged deliberately, and states now pay closer attention to mapping, repair access, and vendor dependence. Yet everyday vulnerability more often involves mundane interactions among weather, anchors, trawling, and maintenance delays. Overstating sabotage can be politically convenient because it frames the problem as exceptional and external. Underinvesting in repair vessels, landing diversity, and regulatory coordination is less dramatic, but often more consequential.

F.F. Landing stations deserve more attention than they usually receive. These sites connect submarine systems to terrestrial networks, and they are governed by land-use rules, power reliability, backhaul costs, and physical security conditions. A country may celebrate a new international cable but still discover that inland distribution remains narrow, expensive, or dependent on one metropolitan hub. In such cases the apparent gain in global connectivity produces only limited social redundancy. National resilience depends on what happens after the cable comes ashore as much as on the cable itself.

G.G. For smaller states, cable policy has therefore become a question of bargaining position. Governments try to attract investors by promising stable rules and efficient permits, yet they also seek leverage over landing rights, local interconnection, and security oversight. The most successful arrangements are rarely those with the loudest rhetoric about technological sovereignty. They are usually those that understand infrastructure as negotiated interdependence: no state builds the global network alone, but neither can it ignore how ownership and route choice distribute power.

H.H. The lesson is that digital resilience is not the same as digital speed. A system can look advanced on consumer metrics while remaining fragile in topological terms. The strongest networks are those with multiple pathways, realistic repair planning, and institutional arrangements that match commercial incentives with public exposure. Undersea cables matter not because they make the internet magical, but because they remind us that modern connectivity rests on hidden chokepoints. Once those chokepoints become visible, arguments about competition policy, national security, and regional development can no longer be kept in separate boxes. They also force regulators to ask who must pay for spare capacity that looks wasteful in narrow accounting terms but indispensable when disruption occurs.

Matching Information

Questions 14-17

Which paragraph contains the following information?

Write the correct letter, A-H, in boxes 14-17.

You may use any letter more than once.

14. a reference to situations in which international connectivity improves but internal resilience remains narrow

15. a statement that route design is influenced by both marine and regulatory constraints

16. a claim that public narratives may exaggerate rare threats while neglecting routine weaknesses

17. an observation that political independence in this sector is usually negotiated rather than absolute

Matching Features

Questions 18-21

Look at the following features (Questions 18-21) and the list of groups below.

Match each feature with the correct group, A-D.

Write the correct letter, A-D, in boxes 18-21.

NB You may use any letter more than once.

18. often seeks lower latency and direct control over traffic routes

A. telecommunications carriers
B. cloud and platform companies
C. national regulators
D. repair-vessel operators

19. was more characteristic of earlier cost-sharing consortia

A. telecommunications carriers
B. cloud and platform companies
C. national regulators
D. repair-vessel operators

20. tries to balance investor attraction with oversight of landing rights

A. telecommunications carriers
B. cloud and platform companies
C. national regulators
D. repair-vessel operators

21. is implied to matter when maintenance delays become a vulnerability

A. telecommunications carriers
B. cloud and platform companies
C. national regulators
D. repair-vessel operators

Multiple Choice

Questions 22-24

Choose the correct letter, A, B, C or D.

22. What is the writer’s main point in paragraph C?

23. According to the passage, what is one consequence of greater corporate involvement in cable finance?

24. What best describes the writer’s overall view of digital resilience?

Summary Completion

Questions 25-27

Complete the summary below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

25. Subsea systems need planned ______ because high capacity alone does not prevent fragility.

26. For some routes, extra infrastructure may require public subsidy or concessional ______.

27. The passage argues that hidden coastal and inland ______ should be made politically visible.

Passage 3

Climate Attribution and the Politics of Loss-and-Damage Finance

How advances in climate attribution science are changing debates over responsibility, compensation, and the design of loss-and-damage finance.

A.A. Loss-and-damage finance enters climate negotiations at the point where adaptation is no longer enough. It concerns harms that cannot be fully prevented through mitigation or managed through local adjustment alone: houses destroyed by intensified storms, livelihoods erased by repeated flooding, or territories made progressively less habitable. For years the politics of the issue were paralysed by fear. Wealthier states worried that acknowledging loss and damage would invite open-ended liability, while vulnerable states argued that refusal to discuss compensation simply shifted the burden of climate disruption onto those least responsible for cumulative emissions.

B.B. Attribution science has changed the argumentative terrain, though not in the simplistic way advocates or critics sometimes suggest. Researchers can increasingly estimate how much human-driven warming altered the probability or intensity of specific heatwaves, rainfall extremes, or drought conditions. That does not mean every disaster now comes with a mathematically precise invoice attached. Attribution is strongest for some hazard types and weaker for others, and social loss is always shaped by exposure, governance, poverty, and infrastructure as well as by meteorology. Even so, the science has made it harder to claim that climate harm is too diffuse to discuss in causal terms at all.

C.C. Negotiators therefore face a double challenge. They must decide whether finance mechanisms should be tied to demonstrable attribution in a narrow evidential sense or whether broad responsibility for cumulative warming is enough to justify support. A rigid event-by-event model might appear legally careful, but it could also reward only those losses that fit well-studied hazards and data-rich settings. Countries with weaker observational systems would then face an epistemic penalty on top of a climatic one. A looser model, however, raises familiar fears among donor states about limitless claims and blurred accountability.

D.D. Another difficulty is temporal. Loss and damage is often discussed through spectacular disasters, yet many harms accumulate gradually. Salinising soils, shifting disease zones, repeated crop instability, and declining freshwater reliability may not produce a single dramatic threshold, but they can steadily erode social and fiscal capacity. Because public attention is drawn to sudden catastrophe, slow-onset loss risks being financed last even where it is developmentally decisive. This temporal bias matters because the communities most affected by gradual degradation are often those least able to document it in ways that translate neatly into international funding templates.

E.E. Critics of compensation language sometimes argue that a focus on payment encourages passivity or litigation rather than resilience. That objection is too crude. In practice, vulnerable states usually demand finance not because they expect lawsuits to solve climate change, but because recovery without fiscal support can trap governments in debt, austerity, and repeated humanitarian emergency. The real design question is whether loss-and-damage funding is additional to existing adaptation and development finance, or merely a relabelled slice of already insufficient commitments. Without additionality, symbolic victory can conceal material substitution.

F.F. Private insurance is often introduced as a pragmatic alternative, yet insurance has sharp limits in this space. It can spread some short-term financial shocks, especially for defined assets and infrequent events, but it performs poorly where hazards are recurrent, systemic, or unaffordable for those facing the highest exposure. Premiums can rise exactly where support is most needed. Insurance may therefore serve as one layer in a wider architecture, but it cannot replace public transfers when climate risk becomes both predictable and socially uneven.

G.G. The most productive recent shift has been institutional rather than rhetorical. Instead of arguing only over blame, negotiators increasingly examine triggers, disbursement speed, governance, and who gets direct access to funds. Those details matter. A facility that exists on paper but releases money slowly, through cumbersome intermediaries, can fail in the very situations it was created to address. Here attribution science can help by sharpening the legitimacy of claims, but administrative design determines whether legitimacy turns into usable relief.

H.H. Loss-and-damage finance will remain politically tense because it sits between ethics and accounting. The issue cannot be resolved by science alone, yet science has narrowed the space for pretending that climate harm is causally unknowable. That is its significance. Attribution does not eliminate judgement; it redistributes it. Negotiators still have to decide what counts as fair contribution, qualifying loss, and timely response. But they now do so under conditions in which causal dismissal is less defensible than before.

Yes/No/Not Given

Questions 28-31

Do the following statements agree with the views of the writer in Reading Passage 3?

In boxes 28-31, write YES if the statement agrees with the views of the writer, NO if the statement contradicts the views of the writer, or NOT GIVEN if it is impossible to say what the writer thinks about this.

28. The writer believes attribution science has made discussion of climate causation more credible.

29. The writer thinks a narrow event-by-event finance model would treat all vulnerable countries fairly.

30. The writer says slow-onset climate losses are easier to fund than sudden disasters.

31. The passage states that private insurers should be excluded from every future loss-and-damage mechanism.

Note Completion

Questions 32-33

Complete the notes below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

32. Attribution evidence is stronger for some ______ types than for others.

33. Countries with weaker observational systems may face an epistemic ______.

Table Completion

Questions 34-35

Complete the table below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

34. Slow-onset losses often escape attention because public focus is drawn to ______ disasters.

35. A key concern is whether new funding is genuinely ______ to existing finance.

Flow-chart Completion

Questions 36-37

Complete the flow chart below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

36. Climate impacts intensify, but adaptation proves ______ in some cases.

37. Negotiators then debate evidential triggers, funding speed, and institutional ______.

Diagram Labelling

Questions 38-39

Label the diagram below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

38. financial layer that can help with some short-term shocks but has clear limits

39. what effective institutional design must turn formal legitimacy into

Short-answer Questions

Question 40

Answer the question below.

Choose NO MORE THAN THREE WORDS from the passage for your answer.

40. What has become less defensible than before, according to the final paragraph?