Cambridge IELTS 21 Academic — Test 1 Reading: All 40 Answers Explained

A Reading answer is a claim about what the passage establishes. That sounds simple until the question quietly changes the person involved, the time, the cause or the strength of the statement. Finding a sentence with the same topic is only the beginning; the real work is deciding what that sentence permits you to conclude.

This guide explains all 40 answers from Cambridge IELTS 21 Academic, Test 1. It assumes that you have completed the test using your own authorized copy. Each answer has been checked against the book's official key and the relevant passage. The explanations are original, and neither the complete passages nor the question sets are reproduced.¹

Paragraph locations below refer to the text in your book. In Passage 2, the printed section letters are used. Claims about art, psychology or sugar are discussed as evidence inside the test; outside knowledge should not replace the passage when you choose an answer.

For factual statements, TRUE means that the proposition agrees with the text; FALSE requires a contradiction; NOT GIVEN means the necessary detail is not established. The YES/NO task applies a corresponding distinction to the writer's views. A statement does not become false merely because you cannot prove it true.

Passage 1 — The Davies Sisters

The passage follows the sisters' background, education, collecting, wartime activity and legacy. Questions 1–7 require a single word from the text. Questions 8–13 test factual agreement. Track changes of period and purpose: the sisters' early purchases and their later Impressionist collection are not the same phase.

Question 1 — Answer: mining

The opening paragraph identifies two industries behind the grandfather's fortune. The question paraphrases one of them as transportation, leaving mining as the missing business activity. The task is not asking for the source of the sisters' money at the moment they received it, so inheritance answers a related but different question.

Shipping is the distractor within the same sentence: its meaning has already been represented in the notes. In completion work, account for the words that are present before deciding what is absent. Mining is the required one-word noun, and no extra word such as industry should be added.

Question 2 — Answer: education

The second paragraph explains how the sisters' schooling prepared them for cultural interests. Its emphasis on the direction of their education corresponds to the note's description of preparation for activities such as collecting art. The word required names the preparation as a whole.

School is nearby and connected to the idea, but the passage's stated relationship centres on education. Upbringing belongs to the previous point about social responsibility and should not be imported into this gap. This question tests recognition of purpose expressed through different wording: a programme directed towards an activity is designed to develop interest or readiness for it.

Question 3 — Answer: notes

The same paragraph describes the sisters recording what they saw when visiting galleries with their governess. Notes names those written observations. The question's adjective about length corresponds to the passage's description of how extensive the record was.

The plural matters. Note would not express the collection of observations identified in the text. Journals is a particularly tempting alternative because it is also a kind of written record and appears nearby in the passage, but it supplies evidence about a different subject in Question 4. Locate the activity as well as the object: here the writing is done during gallery visits.

Question 4 — Answer: journals

The paragraph about Old Master paintings identifies the sisters' journals as evidence of their preference. The passage then explains why that preference did not initially lead to many purchases: the prices were very high relative to what they could or would pay.

Notes from gallery visits cannot be substituted merely because both words refer to writing. The evidence source is explicitly named as journals. The phrase about liking these paintings also should not be confused with purchasing them. A preference can exist without a corresponding action. The skill is matching the evidential relationship, not just recognising a word connected with art.

Question 5 — Answer: Venice

The paragraph introducing the change towards Impressionism identifies the subjects of the first purchases as views of Venice. The gap asks what place was depicted. It does not ask where the sisters travelled, where the paintings were bought or where the artist lived.

Paris is therefore an attractive but incorrect answer: it appears as a place where the sisters encountered examples of the art. Monet identifies the painter, not the location represented. Track the relationship between person, artwork, subject and place. This is a common reason a candidate can find the right sentence yet still extract the wrong proper noun.

Question 6 — Answer: canteen

The wartime paragraph describes the sisters volunteering in a canteen serving troops in France. The note paraphrases troops as soldiers and asks for the workplace. Canteen supplies both the required meaning and the singular noun after the article.

Troyes is the town and France the country; neither names the facility. The fact that the sisters also assisted displaced artists belongs to another part of their wartime activity. Keep separate actions separate. The question does not require knowing anything about the war beyond what the passage establishes, and an assumption that all wartime volunteers worked in hospitals would be misleading.

Question 7 — Answer: friends

The paragraph assessing their unusual position as collectors says that they did not form friendships with artists or gallery owners. The note changes the grammatical pattern: an action involving making friends becomes a statement about not having friends who were artists. The same relationship is preserved.

Advisers is not a valid substitute. The passage expressly acknowledges a trusted advisory circle, so using that word would distort the account. Isolation in the countryside also does not mean that the sisters had no contacts at all. Read the restriction carefully: the relevant absence concerns friendship with a particular group, not every form of professional guidance.

Question 8 — Answer: TRUE

The statement proposes a link between the sisters' early experiences and their later decisions about money. The opening paragraph explicitly connects their religious upbringing with a sense of social responsibility and then with their cultural and charitable spending. Both the influence and its practical consequence are supplied.

This is more than two events appearing next to each other. The passage explains why the upbringing mattered to their choices. Childhood is a broader paraphrase of the early-life background described, and wealth corresponds to their inheritance. You do not need identical wording for TRUE; you need the same proposition supported by the text.

Question 9 — Answer: NOT GIVEN

The statement adds a specific place and kind of seller for the Corot purchases. The passage identifies Corot as an example of an early, relatively conventional purchase, but does not establish the gallery or country in which those particular paintings were acquired.

The artist's nationality cannot establish the location of the sale. Nor can the sisters' trips to France or the later purchase of different paintings in Paris be transferred to these works. FALSE would require evidence of a conflicting purchase location. Here there is no such contradiction; the missing transaction detail remains unknown. Separate a plausible story from a statement actually supported by the passage.

Question 10 — Answer: FALSE

The statement presents Hugh Blaker as resisting the move into French Impressionism. The relevant paragraph instead describes him as a supporter of contemporary French art who contributed to the change. His role is on the supportive side of the decision, contradicting the statement's direction.

The passage leaves the complete explanation for the change uncertain, but that uncertainty does not erase the evidence about Blaker's involvement. NOT GIVEN would be inappropriate because the specific attitude under examination is not wholly absent. The key skill is distinguishing an unresolved overall cause from a particular relationship that the writer does establish.

Question 11 — Answer: NOT GIVEN

The passage establishes that the Cézanne works went to Bath and were the first paintings by that artist publicly exhibited in a British gallery. It does not report visitor numbers, enthusiasm, reviews or another measure of public popularity.

Being first is a statement about historical priority, not audience reception. Public describes the kind of gallery or availability of the display; it does not mean popular. FALSE would require evidence that the exhibition was unpopular. Since neither popularity nor unpopularity is established, the correct answer is NOT GIVEN. This question is a precise test of resisting an inference that feels natural but is not warranted.

Question 12 — Answer: TRUE

The later paragraph connects post-war poverty and disruption with Gwendoline's discomfort about continuing to buy paintings. Her attention moves increasingly towards social purposes and the development of the sisters' home as a cultural venue. That change supports the idea of reconsidering collecting.

The statement does not require an immediate decision on the first day of the war, nor does it say that every earlier purchase was rejected. It asks about influence on her interest and priorities. The evidence is a change in attitude followed by changed spending. Do not make a moderate statement harder to prove by silently adding an absolute such as stopped all cultural activity.

Question 13 — Answer: TRUE

The final paragraph presents the sisters as collecting French Impressionist work when it attracted little attention from other individuals and institutions. That supports the statement about purchasing at a time when few others were doing so.

An earlier reference to fashionable purchases is not a contradiction. It describes the safer paintings bought before the later direction of their collection. The art category and period have changed. A strong review should therefore identify which collection phase each sentence concerns. The same people can make conventional choices at one stage and less conventional choices at another.

Passage 2 — Why we need silence

The seven sections move from bodily responses and public exposure to urban measures, flotation research and qualifications about who benefits from quiet. Questions 14–17 match information to sections; 18–21 complete a summary with one word from the text; 22–26 match statements to people. There is no matching-headings task in this test.

Question 14 — Answer: C

Section C gives concrete measures used to reduce urban noise, including changes to transport, road surfaces, planting and regulation of noisy equipment or vehicles. Its function is to show responses to the problem. The question asks for examples of action, so the collection of interventions is decisive.

Section B describes the scale of harmful exposure, which helps explain why action matters but does not perform the same function. Section G concerns quieter experiences for individuals rather than city-level measures. This is matching information, not matching headings: find the requested content within a section without demanding that your answer summarise every sentence in it.

Question 15 — Answer: B

Section B uses institutional reporting and a numerical estimate to convey how widespread excessive noise is. Those quantities answer the request for evidence of extent. The examples of cities and the proportion of people exposed are doing the work of measurement.

Section A explains bodily responses and possible consequences, but severity of a consequence is not the same as prevalence of exposure. Section C offers solutions rather than measurements of scale. Before searching, translate the task into a function: I need numbers or reported measurements showing how common the problem is. That is more effective than looking only for the word noise, which occurs throughout.

Question 16 — Answer: A

Section A describes changes in blood pressure, muscle tension and hormone release when attention-grabbing sounds occur. These are physiological changes: changes in the body's functioning. The question's technical label is unpacked into concrete processes in the passage.

The research discussed later includes scans and subjective reports, but those details concern responses to quiet or flotation rather than sudden noise. Match both the process and the trigger. Knowing the meaning of physiological helps narrow the search; the final decision still requires the description of what happens when the sound is heard.

Question 17 — Answer: G

Section G compares sitting quietly in an outdoor garden with being in a completely silent room. The reported responses favour the garden on the measures discussed. That is evidence for a distinction between relative quiet and total silence.

Section F's discussion of willingness also qualifies the benefits of silence, but does not supply this specific comparison of environments. Section D explains flotation experiences, again without the same comparison. The question is not asking whether silence is always good or bad. It asks where a particular counterintuitive comparison is supported. Preserve both sides of that comparison when locating the evidence.

Question 18 — Answer: breath

Near the end of Section D, Feinstein identifies attention to breathing as a route into relaxation in the tank. The word used for the focus of attention is breath. The summary changes the surrounding wording but preserves that mechanism.

Breathe is the related verb and cannot complete the noun position after the possessive expression. Breathing would be a possible noun in other sentences, but this task requires one word from the passage, and the key specifies breath. Sounds is a tempting nearby detail because internal noises are discussed, yet those perceptions are distinguished from the feature credited with helping relaxation.

Question 19 — Answer: questionnaire

Section E's first study uses a questionnaire before and after the flotation session. The repeated assessment supplies the basis for comparing participants' reports. The gap asks for the instrument they complete, not for a symptom that changes afterwards.

The second study uses brain imaging, but it involves a different group and design. Do not merge the two experiments merely because they appear in the same section. The spelling of questionnaire deserves deliberate attention, including its doubled letters. In a one-word completion task, a correct explanation of the experiment does not compensate for an incorrectly copied answer.

Question 20 — Answer: wellbeing

The first study's reported outcomes include improved overall wellbeing, alongside greater relaxation and reductions in certain symptoms. The summary's reference to general improvement corresponds to that broader outcome. Wellbeing is the one-word form printed in the key.

Pain and tension are not equivalent alternatives: those measures are described as decreasing, while the gap belongs to the improvement side of the account. Relaxation has already been represented nearby in the summary. Follow the direction of change and avoid repeating information already supplied. The task reports what participants said; it does not ask you to infer a clinical conclusion beyond the study as described.

Question 21 — Answer: depression

Section E's second experiment concerns changes in activity within a network of brain regions described as associated with depression. The answer names that condition. It is not the name of the network itself, which belongs to the explanation of what was measured.

Stress is prominent earlier, but the question points specifically to the association discussed after the scans. Anxiety might sound plausible from general knowledge, yet it is not the answer supported by this sentence. Keep association distinct from proof of treatment: the question establishes which condition the text connects with the network, not that reduced activity conclusively cures it.

Question 22 — Answer: C

In Section F, Tai Dotan Ben-Soussan makes willingness central to the experience and explains that unwanted silence can be upsetting. The statement about silence imposed against a person's wishes is a paraphrase of that condition. C is the letter assigned to her in the task.

Pfeifer also discusses people who may struggle with silence, but his relevant example concerns heightened stress rather than a lack of consent. Similar conclusions can rest on different reasons and belong to different speakers. Locate the precise condition, then check attribution. Do not match all cautionary statements to the first person who expresses a reservation.

Question 23 — Answer: A

Nick Antonio, in Section C, expects further movement towards quieter city environments after describing measures already being taken. The statement turns that expectation into a prediction about an increasing trend. A is therefore the correct person label.

The international organisations mentioned in Section B provide evidence about noise exposure; they are not the source of this particular forecast. Pfeifer's later remarks concern how individuals might find quiet in daily life. Distinguish the scale of the claim: urban policy development is different from an individual's practice, even when both involve quieter surroundings.

Question 24 — Answer: B

In Section D, Justin Feinstein explains why unusual sounds or images can be experienced when external sensory input is greatly reduced. The brain generates experience to make sense of the absence of normal input. B identifies the speaker of that explanation.

The question paraphrases this as a compensatory process. It is not asking who recommends quiet generally or who describes an emotional benefit. Nor should sensory deprivation be confused with an external source of noise entering the tank. The explanatory direction matters: reduced incoming stimulation leads to internally generated perceptions in the account being reported.

Question 25 — Answer: D

Section G attributes to Eric Pfeifer the view that useful quiet need not occupy a long block of time. He favours short, more frequent opportunities over assuming that only extended sessions matter. D is the relevant name label.

The longer flotation sessions in Section E are features of particular studies, not a claim that every useful experience must last that long. This question tests whether you can distinguish an experimental duration from a general recommendation. The statement says a short period can help; it does not promise that any brief pause will have the same effect for every person.

Question 26 — Answer: C

In Section F, Ben-Soussan connects quiet in the surroundings and in the person with greater awareness of the situation and a more suitable response. The question restates both stages: noticing what is happening and responding appropriately. C captures that attribution.

General relaxation is not enough to support this match. You need the additional connection to awareness and response. The same person also supplies the answer to Question 22, and the instructions explicitly allow repeated letters. Never assign each speaker a fixed quota simply to make the answer pattern look balanced.

Passage 3 — Book review: The World of Sugar by Ulbe Bosma

A review contains more than reported history: it also selects, interprets and evaluates. Keep the reviewer's voice separate from a historical actor's interests. Questions 27–30 test the argument and the function of paragraphs; 31–36 use a supplied option list; 37–40 concern agreement with the writer's views.

Question 27 — Answer: B

The opening paragraph describes subsidies and artificially low export prices for beet sugar. The economic effect is to improve its ability to compete internationally, to the disadvantage of cane-sugar producers. B captures that implication.

This is about price and market conditions, not superior quality. The passage's broad geographical scope does not by itself establish a claim about international political relations, and listing producing regions is not evidence that newly opened locations caused higher output. A correct inference stays close to the mechanism described: financial support changes the competitive position of a product.

Question 28 — Answer: A

The second paragraph follows Britain's changing sources of sugar through time: colonial cane production, other overseas suppliers, European beet sugar and eventually domestic beet production. The organising principle is a sequence of changes in sourcing. A reflects that paragraph-level emphasis.

The mention of slavery does not establish steadily growing ethical purchasing. The account includes imports from places where slavery continued. Nor is the paragraph chiefly an explanation of agricultural technology or rising consumer demand. A heading-like decision can appear inside multiple choice: identify what the sequence is being used to demonstrate before selecting a familiar subtopic.

Question 29 — Answer: C

The third paragraph challenges the assumption that sugar cane was produced only on large plantations controlled by wealthy owners. The example of small farmers growing cane alongside another crop in Java is used to disprove that restricted picture. C describes the writer's action: correcting a misconception.

The example is not presented as a comparison proving one method more efficient than another. Nor does it establish why plantations declined. The question asks what the reviewer is doing, not simply what agriculture is being discussed. Read the general claim and the example as a unit: the example's purpose is to widen an overly narrow belief.

Question 30 — Answer: A

The final paragraph describes the history as involving serious harms and stresses that sugar was not an essential necessity. Together, those ideas support A as the reviewer's account of the book's overall message. The continuing dependence of poor producers is a complication within that judgment, not its cancellation.

The other options turn narrower concerns into the main message or introduce a specific policy prescription not established by the conclusion. The question asks for the reviewer's synthesis of the book, not your own position on food policy. Interpret the evaluative language in the final paragraph alongside the explicit point about necessity, rather than choosing one vivid detail from earlier.

Question 31 — Answer: H

The paragraph comparing sugar labour in different countries describes workers arriving from elsewhere to support large-scale production. German fields and US production are examples of dependence on migrant labour. H is the option representing that workforce.

The workers' movement across locations is established; a lack of training is not. Choosing the option about untrained workers would add a characteristic the passage does not supply. The summary requires an answer letter from its list, not a copied word from the passage. That is a different instruction from the earlier completion tasks and must be checked afresh.

Question 32 — Answer: E

The same part of the passage contrasts large-scale industry with the continuation of production on small farms in South Asia and Latin America. E captures the scale of cultivation that persists. The geographical examples help locate the relevant sentence.

Traditional methods are mentioned, making the option about outdated methods tempting. But traditional does not automatically mean obsolete or unsuitable, and the summary's contrast is organised around scale of production. The better match preserves that contrast without inserting a negative judgment. Matching a familiar adjective is weaker evidence than following what the surrounding sentences are comparing.

Question 33 — Answer: I

The next paragraph discusses influential owners, dynasties and corporations seeking to protect their position. I is the broad option covering both powerful individuals and businesses. It fits the reference to actors with interests to defend.

National governments appear in the same argument, but as institutions influenced by those actors rather than the initial group described in this gap. Map the roles before assigning the labels: producers and owners exert influence, states respond, and protective measures follow. Collapsing those stages can produce a plausible sequence of letters with the relationships reversed.

Question 34 — Answer: A

The paragraph says that powerful sugar interests shaped state policy and political decisions. The summary expresses this influence through the option for national governments, A. Cuba is one of the examples that helps confirm the location.

The relevant relationship runs from the industry's powerful actors towards government. Agricultural developments is too broad and belongs to a different aspect of the history. This gap tests institutional paraphrase: politics, state policy and national government are related here, but the match works because of their role in the sentence, not because they are always interchangeable words.

Question 35 — Answer: G

Trade barriers and subsidies are the concrete mechanisms used to protect sugar interests. The summary groups them under the broader label represented by G, financial controls. These are economic measures shaping competition and market access.

Agricultural developments would concern how crops are grown, not how producers are protected from competitors. The mechanisms also should not be confused with the powerful actors who benefit from them. This is abstraction in paraphrase: two specific policy instruments are compressed into a category. A successful answer preserves their function even though the summary does not repeat their names.

Question 36 — Answer: C

The paragraph concludes that poorer countries lost out in the struggle over control of the industry. C identifies those less wealthy nations. The summary's negative consequence corresponds to the disadvantage described in the passage.

Do not replace countries with workers because the preceding history includes difficult labour conditions. This particular sentence identifies national economies as the disadvantaged parties. The task tests the outcome of the policy relationship established in Questions 33–35. Reconstructing the chain—powerful interests, government influence, protection and unequal consequences—helps keep each role distinct.

Question 37 — Answer: YES

The statement connects sugar's large-scale availability with several developments in cultivation and production. The relevant paragraph contrasts earlier small quantities with the effects of improved techniques, crop varieties and agricultural inputs. The claimed direction and breadth of the explanation agree with the writer's account.

The statement does not require identifying one exclusive invention, and the passage supplies a range of developments. YES is the required label because this task asks about the writer's views. Do not substitute TRUE merely because the reasoning resembles the earlier task. Accurate comprehension must still be expressed in the response form requested.

Question 38 — Answer: NOT GIVEN

The passage says that sugar was once treated as a luxury and later promoted for its energy value. The statement adds a more specific historical claim: that advertisers were responsible for its initial marketing as a luxury. That agent and initial campaign are not established.

Being regarded as a luxury is a social status, not necessarily the result of an advertising strategy. The later energy-based promotion does not prove that an earlier luxury campaign never existed, so NO would also overreach. The missing evidence concerns who promoted what, and when. A shared word such as luxury cannot supply that missing relationship.

Question 39 — Answer: NO

The reviewer introduces high-fructose corn syrup as a troubling development and connects its widespread use with concerns about harm. That negative evaluation contradicts the statement presenting the invention as a positive development.

Lower production cost is mentioned, but it is not treated as a reason to endorse the development overall. A financial advantage to manufacturers cannot automatically be converted into the reviewer's approval. This question tests stance: distinguish a factual property from the value judgment attached to it. The answer follows the review's position; it is not an invitation to replace the passage with an independent nutrition debate.

Question 40 — Answer: YES

The passage explicitly identifies processed foods, alongside soft drinks, as products in which high-fructose corn syrup has been adopted. That supports the statement about its presence as an ingredient in many processed foods. Both the use and the broad range are supplied.

This is a question about an ingredient's distribution, not about whether all processed food contains it or whether it has more calories than table sugar. Adding either of those claims would change the proposition. Finish by checking the quantifier: many does not mean every. Precision remains necessary even when the evidence is more direct than in the preceding questions.

The most important paraphrases in Test 1

The productive unit is often a relationship rather than a synonym. In Passage 1, a school programme directed towards cultural activity becomes preparation for an interest in art. Forming friendships becomes having friends within a particular group. Support for a collecting decision contradicts opposition to it. Historical priority does not become popularity simply because both sound positive.

In Passage 2, physiological is made concrete through changes in bodily functioning. The scale of exposure is established with reported measurements. Intention and willingness explain why being forced into silence is a different experience from choosing it. An experiment's duration is not automatically a rule about the minimum time needed to benefit.

In Passage 3, subsidy can improve price competitiveness without proving product quality. A sequence of suppliers becomes a change in sourcing. Overseas workers are grouped as migrant labour. Trade protection and subsidy are compressed into a broader category of economic controls. A product's lower cost is a fact about production, not necessarily an endorsement by the reviewer.

Make your vocabulary record show these distinctions. Beside a phrase, write what its paraphrase preserves: the agent, action, direction, time, quantity or evaluation. Then write one tempting version that changes the meaning. A record that merely lists isolated alternatives for important words will not prepare you for the traps this test actually uses.

What Test 1 Reading teaches you

First, absence and contradiction need different evidence. Questions 9 and 11 concern details that are not reported; Question 10 contradicts a relationship that is reported. In Question 38, the missing detail is not the idea of luxury but its attribution to an initial advertising strategy. Ask exactly which part of a statement remains unsupported.

Second, scope matters. A statement about particular paintings cannot be proved from a purchase of different paintings. A claim about the initial stage of collecting cannot be checked against the final stage without considering the change. In the science passage, an association in a study should not be turned into a guaranteed therapeutic outcome.

Third, grammatical structure carries information. A noun gap, a possessive phrase, an active verb and a passive construction create different requirements. Grammar can eliminate an unsuitable candidate, but it cannot establish an answer without textual evidence. A noun may fit perfectly and still refer to the wrong person, object or experiment.

Finally, not every matching problem rewards the same reading approach. For information matching, identify the requested function and locate it. For people matching, follow attribution and the exact claim. For multiple choice about a paragraph, identify what the examples are doing in the argument. One routine called scanning cannot replace all three decisions.

How to review Test 1 Reading properly

Keep your first answers, including uncertain correct ones. For each item, make a short record with three parts: the proposition in the question, the minimum evidence that settles it, and the relationship between them. Do this in your own words before copying any language from the passage.

For FALSE or NO, write the contradiction explicitly. If you cannot express the conflict without adding outside knowledge, reconsider whether the answer should be NOT GIVEN. For NOT GIVEN, name the missing component rather than merely saying that you could not find the answer. A purchase location, a public reaction and an advertising agent are three different information gaps in this test.

For completion questions, insert the answer into the whole note or summary. Check meaning, word form, number and the instruction about whether to supply a word or a letter. Questions 31–36 require option letters even though the task looks like completion. Do not let the appearance of a gap override its instruction.

For multiple choice, explain why the strongest distractor is wrong. It may report something true elsewhere in the text, emphasise only a secondary point, reverse an attitude or add a cause. Classifying that error gives you a reusable reading skill; memorising the correct letter does not.

Return to selected questions after a delay. Cover the answer key and reconstruct the reasoning from the passage. If you remember the letter but cannot defend it, continue the review. The aim is a more accurate account of what a text says—and an equally accurate awareness of what it leaves unsaid.

For further work on precise paraphrase, read Important IELTS Vocabulary; for the sentence relationships behind the reasoning, use Important IELTS Grammar.