IELTS Reading: psychology passages
Research on how people think, feel and decide: memory, motivation, habits and personality.
63 passages mainly about psychology · 74 more that touch on it · from 125 full tests
Passages mainly about psychology
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 Value of Boredom
- Sleep and Memory
- The Power and Limits of the Nudge
- Music and the Mind
- Does Creativity Fade with Age?
- Rethinking Willpower
- The Case for Risky Play
- The Multitasking Illusion
- The Growth Mindset Debate
- The Marshmallow Test Revisited
- Birth Order and Personality: What the Evidence Shows
- The Quiet Advantage: Rethinking Introverts at Work
- The Anchor Effect: How Initial Numbers Shape Our Judgments
- When Choice Becomes a Burden
- The Video Game Aggression Debate
- How Worried Should We Be About Children's Screen Time?
- The Productivity Cost of Noise
- What Volunteers Gain
- The Loneliness Question
- Why We Laugh
- The Limits of Foresight: How Much Should We Trust Expert Predictions?
- The Wisdom of Crowds
- The Price of Choosing
- The Real Reason We Procrastinate
- Screens and the Teenage Mind
- The Case Against the Digital Detox
- Old Cruelty, New Tools
- The Motivation Trap
- Correcting the Record
- Can Brain-Training Apps Be Trusted?
- Hands Free, Mind Elsewhere
- Headsets and the Talking Cure
- Is Nostalgia a Healthy Way to View the Past?
- The Machinery of Reward
- Two Halves of One Brain
- Why We Recognise Faces but Forget Names
- Building a Palace in the Mind
- How Rumours Spread
- How People Judge Risk
- Why an Hour Can Feel Like a Minute
- The Myth of the Panicking Crowd
- How Optical Illusions Fool the Brain
- How First Impressions Form
- How Children Develop a Sense of Fairness
- How Habits Form
- How Lies Are Detected
- Memory on Repeat
- Counting Before Arithmetic
Show 15 more psychology passages
- How We Read Emotions in Voices
- Why Beliefs Resist Contrary Evidence
- Does the Weather Change How We Feel?
- The Optimism Effect
- Why We Dream
- Making Sense of a Strange City
- Why Children Have Imaginary Friends
- Where Do Moral Judgements Come From?
- How Children Learn to Lie
- How Babies Learn to Walk
- Filling in the Gaps
- How Children Learn to Share
- How We Perceive Beauty
- How Children Play
- Why Teams Lose Their Drive
Other passages that cover psychology
These passages have a different main subject but deal with psychology along the way.
74 passages
- Does Speaking Two Languages Make You Smarter?
- Page Versus Screen
- Playing to Learn?
- The Economics of Happiness
- The Pen and the Keyboard
- Rethinking the Open-Plan Office
- Selling to Children
- News in the Age of the Feed
- The Myth of Learning Styles
- Does Homework Help?
- The Song School: How Birds Learn to Sing
- Measuring Charity Impact
- Clever Corvids
- Do Famous Faces Sell?
- Points of Persuasion: The Hidden Costs of Loyalty Schemes
- The Case for Reading for Pleasure
- Ears or Eyes: The Audiobook Question
- Bringing Nature Indoors
- Office Plants: Beauty or Benefit?
- The Costs of the Daily Commute
- Pets and Human Health: A Sober Look
- What Makes an Expert Teacher?
- Exam Stress Reconsidered
- What the Nose Knows
- The Enduring Puzzle of Left-Handedness
- Nature's Mirror: What Twin Studies Reveal
- The Remote Work Question
- The Language in Your Pocket
- Should Phones Be Banned in Schools?
- Who Is Really Paying for Free Services?
- Can We Trust Online Reviews?
- Should Machines Teach?
- Can Machines Be Creative?
- Who Should Govern the Feed?
- How Old Are You?
- The Green Dot
- The Touch You Cannot See
- The Illusion of Being There
- The Calculator in the Examination Room
- Paying for Surprise: The Argument over Loot Boxes
- The Quiet Room
- The Tyranny of the Password
- Keeping Track of Children
- Are Online Friendships Real Friendships?
- A Percentage of Who You Are
- Can Autobiographies Be Trusted as History?
- Cash for Good Behaviour
- A Day Off for the Mind
- The Body Under Pressure
- Should Students Be Allowed to Use Brain-Enhancing Drugs?
- Should Schools Screen for Mental Health?
- The Rise and Fall of the Lobotomy
- Is Mental Illness Over-Diagnosed?
- Therapy Through a Screen
- Screening the Very Young
- How Children Learn to Read
- Should Children Start School Later?
- Should Toys Be Sold Without Gender Labels?
- The Colour of the Shelf
- Should Coursework Replace Written Examinations?
- Should Critical Thinking Be Taught as a School Subject?
- Learning to See in Colour
- The Bowerbird's Theatre
- How Trust Forms Between Strangers
- Why Scarcity Sells
- Should Exams Be Open-Book?
- Should Sixteen-Year-Olds Vote?
- How Talk Sells Things
- Hire for Attitude, Train for Skill?
- Reading Between the Lines
- Can Animals Count?
- Should Social Media Be Banned for Children Under Sixteen?
- Hands That Talk: Gesture and Speech
- Should Children Walk to School Alone?
Key psychology vocabulary
Words worth knowing before you read about psychology, each with the sentence it appears in.
| Word | Meaning | Example from a passage |
|---|---|---|
| selectively adverb | in a way that reacts only to particular things and not to others | “regions of the brain that respond strongly and selectively to faces” Test 409 |
| inaccessible adjective | stored in memory but impossible to reach at that moment | “The word is stored, in other words, but temporarily inaccessible.” Test 409 |
| notoriously adverb | in a way that is well known, usually because it is difficult | “Learning a new name is also notoriously difficult” Test 409 |
| distinct adjective | separate and clearly different from other things | “whether names and other unique facts are stored in a distinct system” Test 409 |
| modestly adverb | only to a small degree; not greatly | “There is reasonable evidence that such techniques help, though modestly.” Test 409 |
| rhetoric noun | the art of speaking or writing in a way that persuades an audience | “taken up by teachers of rhetoric, who advised speakers to attach each section of a speech” Test 415 |
| embellished adjective | made more interesting or impressive by adding details that may be invented | “The story may well be embellished, but the principle was eagerly taken up” Test 415 |
| hierarchy noun | a system in which items are arranged in ranks, one above another | “by building those times into a hierarchy of associations” Test 415 |
| intensive adjective | involving a great deal of effort concentrated into a limited period | “is often cited as evidence that intensive practice can alter the organisation of the adult brain” Test 415 |
| unremarkable adjective | ordinary and not deserving of special attention or surprise | “they have found people of ordinary intelligence whose brains appear, at least in structure, unremarkable” Test 415 |
| levelling noun | the loss of details from a story as it is retold | “Details that did not fit the teller's expectations were dropped, a process the researchers called levelling” Test 423 |
| susceptible adjective | still able to be affected or persuaded by something | “a rumour behaves like an infection that eventually runs out of susceptible people” Test 423 |
| flourish verb | to grow or develop strongly and become widespread | “the conditions under which rumours flourish, but they cannot yet say in advance” Test 423 |
| censorship noun | the official control or removal of information by an authority | “the most effective response to a rumour is not censorship but a supply of clear, timely information” Test 423 |
| disputed adjective | argued about because people disagree about the facts | “a large number of ordinary users is decisive in any particular case remains disputed” Test 423 |
| distortion noun | a change that makes something less accurate or less true | “A further distortion comes from the way people think about themselves” Test 428 |
| vivid adjective | producing a very clear and strong picture in the mind | “where a vivid memory of a previous disaster was a reasonable guide to the next” Test 428 |
| negligible adjective | so small that it has almost no effect or importance | “described as the avoidance of a single case, it sounds negligible” Test 428 |
| benevolent adjective | kind and helpful; seeming to act for people's good | “If a technology feels benevolent, its benefits seem larger and its risks smaller” Test 428 |
| persistent adjective | continuing for a long time and difficult to remove or change | “such as the persistent gap between the risks people fear and the risks that kill them” Test 428 |
| assembled verb | put together from separate parts or sources | “our sense of how long something lasts appears to be assembled from several separate systems” Test 433 |
| implicated verb | shown or believed to be involved in causing something | “The neurotransmitter dopamine has been repeatedly implicated in timing.” Test 433 |
| retrospective adjective | looking back at events that have already happened | “Some researchers argue that retrospective judgements rest on the number of separate events” Test 433 |
| approximate adjective | close to the true value but not exact | “Such experiments show that the internal clock is approximate” Test 433 |
Question types in these passages
- Multiple choice · 83 passages
- Yes / No / Not Given · 79 passages
- Summary completion (word list) · 60 passages
- Multiple choice (choose more than one) · 33 passages
- Matching features · 24 passages
- Matching sentence endings · 24 passages
- Matching headings · 21 passages
- Summary completion · 20 passages
- Matching information · 19 passages
- Sentence completion · 14 passages
- Table completion · 13 passages
- Flow-chart completion · 8 passages
- Note completion · 6 passages
- Short-answer questions · 3 passages
- True / False / Not Given · 2 passages