IELTS Reading: health and medicine passages
Medicine, disease, nutrition, sleep and public health, from early treatments to modern research.
235 passages mainly about health and medicine · 134 more that touch on it · from 174 full tests
Passages mainly about health and medicine
Each passage opens as a timed 20-minute practice with its 13–14 questions. Submit to see your band estimate and the sentence that proves every answer.
- The Puzzle of the Placebo
- Beneath the Streets of London
- The Mould That Changed Medicine
- The Resistance Problem
- A Clearer View
- The Conquest of Smallpox
- Fighting Disease with Bacteria
- The Conquest of Surgical Pain
- Pets and Human Health: A Sober Look
- Messenger RNA Vaccines
- The Hygiene Hypothesis: Dirt and Disease
- The Science of Pain
- Lessons from Long-Lived Communities
- The Standing Desk Illusion
- The Surgeon's Hands
- The Body as Evidence
- The Body on Your Wrist
- Medicine at a Distance
- The Machine That Reads the Scan
- Whose Body Is It Anyway?
- A Spark for a Failing Heart
- Seeing Inside the Body
- Seeing with Sound: the rise of medical ultrasound
- The Genome in the Post
- The Midnight Screen
- Seeing with Electrodes: The Science of Retinal Implants
- Better Than Well?
- The Theory of the Four Humours
- Scurvy, Lind and the Long Search for a Cure
- How the Hospital Was Invented
- The Influenza Pandemic of 1918
- The Pump in Broad Street
- How the Kidneys Filter the Blood
- Should Advertising of Unhealthy Food to Children Be Banned?
- The Physician Who Counted the Dead
- How the Immune System Remembers
- Should Vaccination Be Compulsory for Schoolchildren?
- The Heart and Its Valves
- Should Organ Donation Be Opt-Out Rather Than Opt-In?
- How a Wound Closes
- A Tax on Sweetness
- The Untried Cure
- The Sense That Keeps Us Upright
- Cash for Good Behaviour
- The Body's Chemical Works
- Should Doctors Be Allowed to Strike?
- The Discovery of Insulin
- Why We Develop a Fever
Show 187 more health and medicine passages
- Should the State Pay for Complementary Medicine?
- Lister and the Invisible Enemy
- The Anatomy of a Tooth
- Is More Screening Always Better?
- The Man Who Followed the Mosquito
- The Thinnest Membrane in the Body
- Smoke Out of Doors
- The Mosquito Proof
- Building Muscle
- Blood and Money
- The Fight Against Polio
- The Science of Allergies
- Free at the Point of Use?
- The Body's Living Barrier
- Choosing Our Children
- How a Broken Bone Mends Itself
- Choosing How to Die
- How the Eye Brings Light into Focus
- Should the Minimum Age for Buying Alcohol Be Raised?
- The Surgeon and the Voyageur
- The Air Between Us
- The Hormones of Hunger
- An Open Record?
- The Body's Most Misunderstood Hinge
- Medicine on the Airwaves
- The First Heart Transplant
- How the Body Controls Its Temperature
- Should Obesity Be Classified as a Disease?
- The Long Search for the Vitamins
- Who Should Pay for Fertility Treatment?
- The Column That Holds Us Up
- How Blood Clots
- Owning Up: Should Doctors Admit Their Mistakes?
- Two Brothers in Boston
- Building a Fair Test
- The Organ That Makes a Voice
- Should Health Apps Be Regulated Like Medicines?
- The Long Journey of a Meal
- Should Energy Drinks Be Banned for Children?
- The Drug That Rewrote the Rules
- How the Body Decides How Tall to Grow
- Should Prescriptions Be Free for Everyone?
- The Magic Bullet: Paul Ehrlich and Salvarsan
- Living with Thin Air
- Should Hospitals Be Run Like Businesses?
- The Man Who Sorted Human Blood
- Why We Cough
- A Prescription for Company?
- The Birth of the Blood Bank
- Should Cycle Helmets Be Compulsory?
- Standing In for the Kidney
- Who Should Care for Whom?
- The Germ of Laziness: Hookworm and the Rockefeller Campaign
- How the Arch of the Foot Carries Our Weight
- Should Red Meat Be Taxed for Health Reasons?
- A Window in Her Home: Cicely Saunders and the Hospice Movement
- Should Patients Be Charged for Missed Appointments?
- The Bacterium in the Stomach
- The Case for Cutting Salt
- The Salt and Sugar Cure
- The Body's Water Account
- A Question of Conscience
- The Campaign Against Guinea Worm
- The Film That Protects the Eye
- A Day Off for the Mind
- The First Breath
- Do Healthy People Need Vitamin Pills?
- Should We Release Genetically Modified Mosquitoes?
- The Vaping Dilemma
- A Right to Try?
- Should Experts Check What We Read About Health?
- Open Doors on the Ward
- How the Body Fights a Cold
- Too Young for the Scalpel?
- How a Blood Pressure Cuff Works
- The Town That Changed Medicine
- Proof by Numbers: Doll, Hill and Lung Cancer
- Sunlight, Skin and Vitamin D
- A Moving Age Limit
- The Bacterium in the Nodule: Gerhard Armauer Hansen and Leprosy
- The Shoulder: Mobility at a Price
- Should Schools Weigh Their Pupils?
- The Making of the Pill
- The Organ That Feeds a Baby
- Should Governments Set the Prices of Medicines?
- Should Antibiotics Be Sold Only on Prescription?
- Should Every Newborn Have Its Genome Sequenced?
- The First Test-Tube Baby
- Turning the Body's Weapons into Drugs
- Who Should Write the Prescription?
- Healers at the Clinic Door
- Quinine and the Fever Tree
- The Parasite's Journey
- Who Should Pay to Eradicate Disease?
- The Body Under Pressure
- Opening the Chest
- Caffeine and the Body
- Should Teenagers Be Allowed Caffeine?
- The Birth of a World Health Organization
- Keeping Vaccines Cold
- Should Health Care Be Rationed by Age?
- The Case of Auguste Deter
- Should People Be Told Their Risk of an Incurable Disease?
- The Making of Cardiopulmonary Resuscitation
- The Trial That Settled the Question
- What the Body Does with a Drink
- A Warning on Every Bottle?
- Should Masks Be Required on Public Transport in Flu Season?
- What Happens in the Brain During a Stroke
- Should Hospitals Serve Only Healthy Food?
- How Arteries Become Blocked
- Shorter Shifts, Safer Care?
- The Body in Free Fall
- The Vaccination Question
- The Rise and Fall of the Lobotomy
- How Antidepressants Are Thought to Work
- Is Mental Illness Over-Diagnosed?
- An Iron Rod Through the Brain
- Growing the Measles Vaccine
- The Mathematics of the Herd
- Closing the Border
- Naming the Virus: The Identification of HIV
- How Antiviral Drugs Work
- Who Should Pay for HIV Prevention?
- The Epidemic That Changed the Rules
- How Protective Suits Keep Health Workers Safe
- The SARS Outbreak of 2003
- How Contact Tracing Works
- Should Contact Tracing Use Phone Location Data?
- How Life Expectancy Is Calculated
- Is a Longer Life Always a Worthwhile Goal?
- The Case for Prevention
- Understanding Inflammation
- Should Painkillers Be Sold Only in Pharmacies?
- The Mould and the Enzyme
- How Cholesterol Travels in the Blood
- Should Healthy People Take Preventive Medicines?
- The Search for a New Malaria Drug
- A Medicine from the Soil
- Learning to Live with the Enemy
- The Generosity Problem
- Are Natural Remedies Safer Than Synthetic Ones?
- The Soft Spots in a Baby's Head
- Should Home Births Be Encouraged?
- Pushing the Cloud Aside: The Oldest Cataract Operation
- Should More Hospital Care Be Provided in Patients' Homes?
- How an Artificial Hip Joint Works
- How Should We Judge a Hospital?
- Reading the Pressure Within
- Should Everyone over Forty Be Offered a Health Check?
- A Centre for the Healthy
- Why Exercise Changes the Brain
- How Skin Grafts Take Hold
- Should People Be Paid to Donate Organs?
- The Man Behind the Heel Prick
- A Few Drops of Blood
- How Many Conditions Should We Test For?
- The End of the Cattle Plague
- Crossing the Species Barrier
- Should Wildlife Markets Be Closed?
- The Grand Rapids Fluoridation Experiment
- The Invisible Community: How Mouth Bacteria Cause Gum Disease
- Should Water Fluoridation Continue?
- The Conquest of Goitre
- How the Thyroid Uses Iodine
- Should Vitamins Be Added by Law?
- The Discovery of the Rhesus Factor
- How Pregnancy Changes the Mother's Body
- A Little of What You Fancy?
- Therapy Through a Screen
- A Chemical Against Leukaemia: Sidney Farber and the Birth of Chemotherapy
- How Cancer Grows and Spreads
- The Price of a Few Extra Months
- The Man Who Read the Cells
- Judging the Test, Not the Disease
- Choosing Your Doctor
- The Vaccine That Soldiers Distrusted
- The Poison and the Serum
- How Tetanus Poisons the Nerves
- Paying for Illness You Could Have Avoided
- Why We Itch
- When the Body Loses Blood
- The First Immune System
- Building a Brain
- Screening the Very Young
- Learning to See in Colour
- Why Teenagers Sleep Late
Other passages that cover health and medicine
These passages have a different main subject but deal with health and medicine along the way.
134 passages
- Sleep and Memory
- Green Cities, Healthy Citizens?
- Steel Caregivers: Robots for an Ageing World
- The Unfinished Problem of Aircraft Noise
- How Worried Should We Be About Children's Screen Time?
- The Rays that Changed Medicine
- A Simple Tube that Changed Medicine
- Bringing Nature Indoors
- Office Plants: Beauty or Benefit?
- What Volunteers Gain
- The Loneliness Question
- The Body's Inner Clock
- The Gut Microbiome
- Exam Stress Reconsidered
- Screens and the Teenage Mind
- The Case Against the Digital Detox
- Wearing the Machine
- Building with Living Cells
- Reading the Mind
- The Motivation Trap
- How Old Are You?
- From Ear Trumpets to Digital Chips
- Slices of the Body: The Invention of the CT Scanner
- The Alarm on the Ceiling
- The Uncomplaining Passenger
- Can Brain-Training Apps Be Trusted?
- The Bionic Limb
- A Computer in the Eye
- A Short History of the Contact Lens
- Swimmers in the Bloodstream
- Headsets and the Talking Cure
- The Great Mortality
- The Factory Acts and Child Labour
- The Lady with the Lamp
- William Harvey and the Circulation of the Blood
- Vesalius and the Fabric of the Human Body
- The Man Who Found the Bacillus
- Mother Seacole: Nursing in the Crimea
- The Chart That Measured Sight
- The Witness of Solferino
- The Door She Forced Open
- The Crystal That Kept Its Secret
- How Stem Cells Work
- The Restless Curiosity of John Hunter
- Choosing the Doctors of the Future
- A Service for Everyone: the Birth of the NHS
- The Case of the Laboratory Animal
- Hippocrates of Cos
- Avicenna and the Canon of Medicine
- Drains Before Doctors
- Why Some People See Colours Differently
- The Stomach's Delicate Truce
- The Woman Behind the Score
- The Machine That Breathed
- The Making of Edinburgh's Medical School
- How an Inhaler Delivers Its Dose
- Galen of Pergamon
- The Body's Own Pharmacy
- The Physician Who Asked About Work
- How Nerve Cells Carry Signals
- The Cook Who Carried Typhoid
- The Body's Second Network
- The Flying Ambulance
- The Man Who Made the Heartbeat Visible
- Should Employers Monitor Their Staff's Health?
- Why Cells Grow Old
- Fitness to Drive
- The Lens That Nobody Wanted
- Mending the Code
- Patents and Pandemics
- Houses of the Sick: The Bimaristan
- The Hand: Bone, Tendon and Pulley
- The Licence That Opened a Door
- The Chemistry of a Snakebite
- A Needle Under the Skin
- Cars at the School Gate
- Pierre Fauchard and the Birth of Modern Dentistry
- How the Brain Controls Movement
- Should Heading the Ball Be Banned in Youth Football?
- How the Brain Changes with Age
- Standing In for the Heart
- Who Pays for the Fall?
- The Doctors of Rochester
- The Filter in the Fabric
- Harvey Cushing and the Birth of Neurosurgery
- The Surgeon of Varanasi
- Rebuilding the Herbals: Li Shizhen and the Compendium of Materia Medica
- Finding the Active Ingredient
- Should Medical Training Be Shortened?
- An Ambulance with Wings
- The Anatomy of the Brain: Thomas Willis
- The Blood-Brain Barrier
- Should Students Be Allowed to Use Brain-Enhancing Drugs?
- Wilder Penfield and the Map of the Brain
- Should Schools Screen for Mental Health?
- What the Frontal Lobes Do
- Should Boxing Be Banned?
- How a Genetic Test Reads DNA
- Should Insurers See Our Genes?
- Should Volunteers Be Sent to Fight Outbreaks?
- Counting the Dead: John Graunt and the London Bills of Mortality
- Forty Days Ashore
- Counting the Next Move
- From Willow Bark to Aspirin
- The Pharmacy in the Leaf
- Who Should Profit from Traditional Knowledge?
- Paracelsus and the Chemistry of Medicine
- Why the Dose Makes the Poison
- Opening the Skull: Trepanation in the Ancient World
- The Sense of Touch
- The Instrument in the Doctor's Bag
- How the Circulation Controls Blood Pressure
- Should Schools Make Pupils Run a Mile Every Day?
- Rebuilding the Wounded Face
- The Quaker Experiment at York
- Two Halves of One Brain
- The Filter That Works by Waiting
- Should Bottled Water Be Discouraged?
- The Serum Run to Nome
- Sniffing Out Disease
- Teaching the Bystander
- First Aid in Every Classroom?
- The Travelling Midwife
- How Long Should Parents Stay Home?
- The Edwin Smith Papyrus
- Should Competitive Sport Be Compulsory in Schools?
- Does the Weather Change How We Feel?
- How the Ear Turns Sound into Signals
- Why We Dream
- Should Cities Ban Private Fireworks Displays?
- How Babies Learn to Walk
- Filling in the Gaps
- Should Every Child Learn to Swim at School?
- Should City Speed Limits Fall to 30 km/h?
Key health and medicine vocabulary
Words worth knowing before you read about health and medicine, each with the sentence it appears in.
| Word | Meaning | Example from a passage |
|---|---|---|
| immature adjective | not yet fully grown or fully developed | “where cones are most densely packed and vision is sharpest, is immature” Test 443 |
| habituation noun | a method in which repeated exposure to something reduces interest in it | “A later refinement, habituation, presents the same stimulus repeatedly until interest fades” Test 443 |
| contested adjective | argued about because people do not agree | “Experience plays a part, though exactly how much is contested.” Test 443 |
| maturation noun | the gradual process of becoming fully developed | “the exact timing of its maturation is still debated” Test 443 |
| robust adjective | strong and able to develop well despite difficult conditions | “The same evidence, though, shows how robust development is when the input arrives on time” Test 443 |
| circadian adjective | relating to the roughly twenty-four-hour cycle of bodily activity | “The first is a circadian clock in the brain” Test 462 |
| hypothalamus noun | a small region of the brain that controls temperature, hormones and daily rhythms | “a cluster of cells in the hypothalamus that sets the timing of almost everything” Test 462 |
| adolescence noun | the period of life between childhood and adulthood | “Insufficient sleep in adolescence is associated with poorer concentration in class” Test 462 |
| irritability noun | a tendency to become annoyed easily and quickly | “lower mood, irritability and a higher risk of accidental injury” Test 462 |
| drowsiness noun | the state of feeling sleepy and finding it hard to stay awake | “Since teenage drivers are inexperienced, drowsiness adds a particular danger” Test 462 |
Question types in these passages
- Multiple choice · 147 passages
- True / False / Not Given · 141 passages
- Yes / No / Not Given · 123 passages
- Matching headings · 69 passages
- Matching features · 64 passages
- Summary completion (word list) · 60 passages
- Summary completion · 58 passages
- Matching information · 56 passages
- Multiple choice (choose more than one) · 51 passages
- Matching sentence endings · 36 passages
- Table completion · 35 passages
- Note completion · 34 passages
- Sentence completion · 33 passages
- Short-answer questions · 33 passages
- Diagram label completion · 27 passages
- Flow-chart completion · 22 passages