Reading Lab

IELTS Academic Reading Practice Pack 7

A new Academic Reading set on heat pumps, platform work, and antibiotic resistance, built from the topic bank and designed for premium exam-style practice.

Question count

Time allowed

60 min

Passages

academicreadingfull mockenergylabourhealthtfngynngqa candidate

Exam panel

You have 60 minutes including answer transfer time. Submit once at the end or let the timer finish the exam automatically.

Time remaining

60:00

0 / 40 answers filled

Write only what the question requires. One extra word can still lose the mark.

After submission, you will see your raw score, estimated Academic Reading band, and the correct answers for every question.

Passage 1

Heat Pumps and the Rewiring of Household Energy

Why heat pumps are technically efficient, why retrofits remain uneven, and why the energy transition problem is as much about buildings and timing as about appliances.

A.A. Heat pumps have moved from engineering marginalia to the centre of climate policy because they promise something politically attractive: lower-emission home heating without requiring households to endure cold homes or abandon familiar expectations of comfort. Yet the technology's growing visibility can be misleading. Public debate often treats the heat pump as a single object that either works or fails, whereas its performance depends on a system of insulation, pipework, electricity pricing, installer skill, and user expectations. The appliance sits at the centre of the discussion, but the real transition question is whether buildings and institutions are ready for the way it operates over long winters and uneven household routines.

B.B. The basic thermodynamic principle is simple enough to explain and easy to oversimplify. A heat pump does not create warmth by burning fuel inside the home. Instead, it moves heat from outside to inside by circulating a refrigerant through compression and expansion cycles. Because it transfers energy rather than generating all of it directly, one unit of electricity can under favourable conditions deliver several units of useful heat. That ratio is usually expressed through a coefficient of performance, but the headline number can disguise how sharply real output changes with outdoor temperature, flow settings, and building demand.

C.C. Those conditions matter most in older housing stock. A well-insulated dwelling with oversized emitters can often run effectively at lower water temperatures, which is where many heat pumps perform best. By contrast, leaky buildings with undersized radiators may still be heated by a pump, but often only if the rest of the system is altered or if the unit is pushed into less efficient operating ranges. Critics sometimes treat this as proof that the technology itself is unsound. Supporters sometimes imply that every building is one installer visit away from high performance. Both claims are too neat. Retrofit difficulty is neither universal failure nor trivial inconvenience.

D.D. Electricity networks introduce another layer of complexity. A gas boiler can be assessed largely at the level of one home, but a heat pump transition changes the shape of demand across neighbourhoods and seasons. If large numbers of households draw power during the same cold evening period, local peak loads can rise even while annual emissions fall. System planners therefore care not only about appliance efficiency, but also about tariffs, thermal storage, controls, and whether demand can be shifted away from stressed hours. What looks efficient in annual averages may still be awkward at the level of winter peaks.

E.E. Social distribution shapes adoption as strongly as physics does. Owner-occupiers with savings, clear property rights, and access to installers can usually act more easily than tenants, leaseholders, or households waiting for landlords to approve changes. Subsidies help, but they do not remove every barrier if people cannot front the remaining capital, navigate paperwork, or trust projected savings. In some countries the households most exposed to volatile heating bills live in precisely the dwellings that are hardest to retrofit. A policy marketed as universal clean progress can therefore reproduce older housing inequalities unless it is designed around tenure and income realities.

F.F. The performance gap between laboratory promise and everyday results has also highlighted the importance of labour. Poor commissioning, weak controls setup, and inadequate user guidance can make a competent system appear disappointing. Some installers have extensive training in sizing, refrigerant handling, and system balancing; others entered a fast-growing market before the training base had caught up. Monitoring has exposed cases in which households believed the technology itself had failed when the deeper problem was settings, emitter design, or a mismatch between the unit and the building. The lesson is uncomfortable but clear: scaling a technology requires scaling the workforce and feedback systems around it.

G.G. The strongest case for heat pumps is therefore conditional rather than absolute. They can play a major role in decarbonising buildings, especially where grids continue to clean up and where homes are upgraded to use low-temperature heat effectively. But the technology works best when treated not as a plug-in substitute for every boiler, nor as a symbolic badge of environmental virtue, but as part of a wider reorganisation of buildings, electricity demand, and public support. The appliance matters. The infrastructure around it matters more, and so does the patient administrative work that makes households trust the transition.

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 social barriers can preserve old energy inequalities
ii. A transfer mechanism whose headline efficiency can mislead
iii. Why installer skill affects whether a system seems successful
iv. A building problem that resists simple ideological claims
v. Why electricity peaks matter as much as annual averages
vi. Evidence that every older building is unsuited to the technology
vii. A universal subsidy model that removes every adoption barrier
viii. The claim that the device should be judged in isolation

2. Paragraph C

i. Why social barriers can preserve old energy inequalities
ii. A transfer mechanism whose headline efficiency can mislead
iii. Why installer skill affects whether a system seems successful
iv. A building problem that resists simple ideological claims
v. Why electricity peaks matter as much as annual averages
vi. Evidence that every older building is unsuited to the technology
vii. A universal subsidy model that removes every adoption barrier
viii. The claim that the device should be judged in isolation

3. Paragraph D

i. Why social barriers can preserve old energy inequalities
ii. A transfer mechanism whose headline efficiency can mislead
iii. Why installer skill affects whether a system seems successful
iv. A building problem that resists simple ideological claims
v. Why electricity peaks matter as much as annual averages
vi. Evidence that every older building is unsuited to the technology
vii. A universal subsidy model that removes every adoption barrier
viii. The claim that the device should be judged in isolation

4. Paragraph E

i. Why social barriers can preserve old energy inequalities
ii. A transfer mechanism whose headline efficiency can mislead
iii. Why installer skill affects whether a system seems successful
iv. A building problem that resists simple ideological claims
v. Why electricity peaks matter as much as annual averages
vi. Evidence that every older building is unsuited to the technology
vii. A universal subsidy model that removes every adoption barrier
viii. The claim that the device should be judged in isolation

5. Paragraph F

i. Why social barriers can preserve old energy inequalities
ii. A transfer mechanism whose headline efficiency can mislead
iii. Why installer skill affects whether a system seems successful
iv. A building problem that resists simple ideological claims
v. Why electricity peaks matter as much as annual averages
vi. Evidence that every older building is unsuited to the technology
vii. A universal subsidy model that removes every adoption barrier
viii. The claim that the device should be judged in isolation

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 states that a heat pump warms a home by burning fuel inside the property.

7. The passage says poorly insulated homes can never benefit from heat pumps.

8. A neighbourhood-wide switch to heat pumps may raise local peak electricity demand during cold periods.

9. Most national subsidy programmes are aimed specifically at private tenants rather than owner-occupiers.

Sentence Completion

Questions 10-13

Complete the sentences below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

10. A heat pump moves heat by circulating a ______ through compression and expansion cycles.

11. Many older homes need larger heat ______ to work well at lower temperatures.

12. Electricity demand can be shifted with tariffs, thermal storage, and smarter ______.

13. Scaling the technology requires scaling the workforce and ______ systems around it.

Passage 2

Platform Work and the Metrics of Invisible Labour

Why digital labour platforms rely on metrics instead of traditional supervision, and why the resulting system often hides risk, unpaid effort, and uncertain accountability.

A.A. Platform work is frequently advertised as frictionless flexibility. A driver can log in when convenient, a courier can choose a shift, a freelance worker can accept only desirable tasks, and a household can order labour through an interface that appears neutral and efficient. The attraction is real enough, especially for workers needing fragmented or transitional income. Yet this description captures only the visible transaction. Behind the interface sits a system that must sort workers, rank performance, estimate future availability, and reassure clients that a service purchased through software can still be trusted. Flexibility is not false, but it is curated, priced, and distributed through rules that the worker does not fully control.

B.B. That curation depends heavily on metrics. Traditional firms can rely on managers who watch attendance, inspect process, and correct behaviour directly. Platforms often substitute ratings, response times, task-acceptance rates, completion speed, cancellations, and message behaviour. These measures do more than describe past performance. They help allocate future work, determine bonuses, shape search visibility, and sometimes trigger deactivation. The worker therefore experiences management not as a supervisor standing nearby, but as a stream of scores and thresholds whose meaning may be partly understood yet rarely fully negotiable. A technical dashboard becomes the workplace hierarchy in compressed numerical form.

C.C. The difficulty is that many metrics are not pure observations of labour quality. A low rating may reflect traffic, unclear customer instructions, unrealistic delivery windows, or bias unrelated to the task itself. A fast response score may partly measure who can afford to remain constantly available. Acceptance rates may look like commitment while actually reflecting how often an algorithm offers poorly paid or geographically inefficient work. In that sense, platforms often govern workers through proxies. The number looks precise, but the behaviour it supposedly captures is only inferred indirectly, and the worker may bear the penalty for noise generated elsewhere in the system.

D.D. Workers respond by performing forms of labour that the platform often leaves off the official ledger. They keep devices charged, monitor multiple apps, reposition themselves in anticipation of demand, rewrite profiles, manage customer emotions, photograph completed tasks defensively, and learn how to avoid algorithmic penalties. Some of this effort may improve service quality; much of it is simply insurance against misclassification or lost work. The platform can present the paid task as a neat unit, while the worker experiences a much wider field of preparation, waiting, and self-protection around it. This invisible margin is one reason hourly earnings are often harder to interpret than headline per-task pay suggests.

E.E. Regulation struggles because classification disputes rarely concern labels alone. If a platform can set prices, shape visibility, monitor behaviour, penalise refusal, and terminate access, the claim that it merely hosts independent entrepreneurs becomes harder to sustain. Yet lawmakers inherit tests developed for older labour markets and apply them to organisations that can change operational details faster than legal categories can stabilise. The result is repeated conflict over what counts as control, what counts as entrepreneurship, and whether software-mediated dependence should be treated as a genuinely new condition or as a familiar employment relationship in updated clothing. Each legal adjustment is followed by another technical redesign that tests the boundary again.

F.F. Clients and firms using platforms face an informational trade-off of their own. Standardised dashboards, instant booking, and visible review histories reduce search costs and make labour feel legible at scale. But the same simplification can obscure how much uncertainty has been pushed onto workers. A household may see only a punctual cleaner with a high score, not the unpaid messaging, travel gaps, and rating anxiety that helped produce that score. Businesses purchasing large volumes of platform labour may appreciate standardisation while remaining insulated from the process by which the standard was manufactured. Convenience at the demand side can therefore depend on opacity at the labour side.

G.G. The strongest reform proposals therefore focus less on eliminating metrics than on making them contestable. Workers may need access to the factors influencing visibility, clearer routes to challenge automated penalties, and transparency about when customer scores are treated as decisive. Regulators may need audit rights rather than only promises of ethical design. Clients may also need to recognise that a low-friction service often depends on labour made intentionally difficult to see. The central issue is not whether platforms use data. It is whether data-driven management can be subjected to rules that the managed can actually examine, understand, and dispute without losing access to income first.

Matching Information

Questions 14-17

Which paragraph contains the following information?

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

14. a claim that workers perform defensive and preparatory tasks outside the officially paid unit of labour

15. an argument that legal tests inherited from older labour markets struggle to keep pace with platform change

16. an explanation that many platform measurements are only indirect indicators of the behaviour they claim to assess

17. a concession that the attraction of flexible platform work is not entirely imaginary

Matching Features

Questions 18-21

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

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

You may use any letter more than once.

18. may use dashboards and review histories to reduce the cost of selecting labour

A. workers
B. platforms
C. clients and firms
D. regulators

19. may interpret a number as exact even when it is built from noisy proxies

A. workers
B. platforms
C. clients and firms
D. regulators

20. may need audit powers rather than relying only on promises about ethical system design

A. workers
B. platforms
C. clients and firms
D. regulators

21. may carry out unpaid upkeep and self-protection around the visible paid task

A. workers
B. platforms
C. clients and firms
D. regulators

Multiple Choice

Questions 22-24

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

Write the correct letter in boxes 22-24.

22. What is the writer's main point in the passage?

23. Why does the writer discuss ratings, response times, and acceptance rates in paragraph B?

24. What is implied about effective reform?

Summary Completion

Questions 25-27

Complete the summary below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

25. Platforms use performance scores to make labour look dependable and to create a ______ system for future allocation.

26. Around the paid task, workers often perform additional unpaid activity such as preparation, ______, and self-protection.

27. The writer argues that reform should make data-driven management more ______ to those being managed.

Passage 3

Antibiotic Resistance and the Market Failure of Future Medicine

Why antibiotics create an unusual market problem: they are socially indispensable, scientifically exhaustible, and commercially misaligned with the way pharmaceutical rewards are usually structured.

A.A. Antibiotics occupy a strange position in modern medicine. They are among the most valuable therapies ever developed, yet their value grows partly from not using them too freely. A successful antibiotic protects surgical care, cancer treatment, neonatal medicine, and ordinary infection management across an entire health system. At the same time, each course contributes to evolutionary pressure that can make the drug less useful later. The result is a class of medicines whose social importance is obvious, but whose long-term preservation depends on restraint rather than maximal volume. Few other therapeutic markets are asked to value scarcity and access at the same time.

B.B. Resistance is not an abstract future threat. Bacteria adapt through selection, exchange genetic material, and spread across hospitals, farms, wastewater systems, and international travel networks. That is why the problem is broader than one patient's prescription. Stewardship programmes can reduce unnecessary use, but stewardship does not erase the need for new antibiotics once older ones lose effectiveness. Prevention, hygiene, vaccination, and diagnostics matter as well, yet none of them removes the underlying evolutionary reality that bacterial populations continue to change under selective pressure. Every intervention changes the tempo of the problem more easily than it changes its existence.

C.C. This creates a severe commercial mismatch. Standard pharmaceutical markets reward products that can be sold in large volumes over long periods. By contrast, a genuinely useful new antibiotic may be deliberately reserved for the most dangerous infections. Good clinical practice therefore suppresses the sales that would normally repay research and development. Companies are asked to invest heavily in a product whose public value depends on limiting use. Unsurprisingly, many firms have reduced or abandoned antibacterial pipelines, not because the science lacks importance, but because the revenue model looks structurally weak. Commercial success and public-health success pull in opposite directions.

D.D. Policy reform has increasingly focused on delinkage: rewarding innovation without tying payment directly to the number of doses sold. Under subscription-style models, a health system pays for reliable access, surveillance obligations, and continued availability rather than simply reimbursing unit volume. The logic is to treat an effective antibiotic less like a consumer good and more like fire infrastructure: expensive to maintain, hopefully not overused, but socially disastrous to lack when needed. Delinkage does not solve every problem, yet it addresses the central contradiction more honestly than a sales-maximising model does. It changes the reward signal even if it does not eliminate scientific risk.

E.E. Access complicates the picture. Some countries still face shortages of older, inexpensive antibiotics, while others debate how to preserve the effectiveness of the newest agents. A policy designed only around conservation in wealthy settings may ignore the burden of untreated infection elsewhere. Conversely, a policy framed only as access may accelerate misuse if diagnostics are weak, prescribing incentives are distorted, or substandard medicines circulate in the market. The challenge is not to choose access or stewardship, but to prevent either from being used as a slogan that erases the other. Distribution failure and overuse can coexist within the same global system.

F.F. The writer's position is therefore mixed but definite. New antibiotics are necessary, and arguments suggesting that lower use alone can replace innovation are not persuasive. But new products on their own will not secure the future of infection control. Without surveillance, laboratory capacity, infection prevention, vaccination, and rapid diagnostics, even a stronger pipeline will be consumed carelessly or deployed too late. The system fails when the debate is reduced to one heroic breakthrough medicine rather than the institutional ecology that determines how medicines are actually used. Discovery matters, but stewardship and diagnosis determine how long discovery remains valuable.

G.G. The deeper lesson is that antibiotics reveal a market failure with unusual clarity. Society wants companies to discover drugs that may need to be held in reserve, clinicians to preserve them, and governments to pay for availability before crisis becomes visible. Those incentives do not align automatically. Any serious response must therefore coordinate science, payment, stewardship, and global surveillance rather than assuming that one successful molecule will repair the whole system. The policy question is not whether antibiotics matter. It is how to reward their future existence without rewarding their overuse, and how to keep that compromise politically durable once the immediate crisis fades from view.

Yes/No/Not Given

Questions 28-31

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

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

28. The writer accepts that reducing unnecessary antibiotic use does not eliminate the need for new drugs.

29. The writer argues that subscription payment models have already solved the antibiotic innovation problem worldwide.

30. The writer states that resistance surveillance is measured with equal quality in every country.

31. The writer suggests that antibiotics should be rewarded partly for reliable availability rather than for high sales volume.

Note Completion

Questions 32-33

Complete the notes below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

32. Bacteria can adapt under selection and also exchange ______ material across networks of spread.

33. Even a stronger drug pipeline may be deployed too late if laboratory ______ remains weak.

Table Completion

Questions 34-35

Complete the table below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

34. Conventional pharmaceutical markets reward products sold in large ______ over time.

35. Under delinkage, payment can be tied to continued ______ rather than dose sales alone.

Flow-chart Completion

Questions 36-37

Complete the flow-chart below.

Choose ONE WORD ONLY from the passage for each answer.

36. First, ______ infection accurately.

37. Then ______ the newest agents for the most dangerous cases.

Diagram Labelling

Questions 38-39

Label the diagram below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

38. Cross-border monitoring system label A: global ______

39. Delinkage payment approach label B: ______-style model

Short-answer Questions

Question 40

Answer the question below.

Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage.

40. What kind of tool does the passage identify as helping clinicians reduce misuse by making earlier treatment decisions more precise?