English readings at level B2
300 original readings written by the FitForm team, graded B1 → C2 and sorted by topic. Reading is free and needs no account; exercises, vocabulary review and essay marking need a FitForm login.
What FitForm League is
FitForm League is a web platform that turns short bursts of exercise into a game for secondary school…
How a camera counts a repetition
Counting looks simple to a human and is surprisingly hard for a computer. FitForm uses a pose model from an…
Why streaks work
A streak is simply the number of days in a row on which you complete a task. It sounds trivial, yet in many…
Exercise and the teenage brain
The World Health Organization advises that young people between five and seventeen should be physically…
What a queue teaches
A queue is a small economy. It has a scarce resource, a rule for sharing it, and people who respond to…
How a school chooses software
Students often assume that schools buy software the way they choose an app: someone sees it, likes it and…
The language of sport
English is full of expressions borrowed from sport, and people use them without noticing. Learning them is…
A job that did not exist
Ask an adult what they wanted to be at fourteen and the answer is usually a job that still exists: doctor,…
Sleep and the exam
The night before an important exam, thousands of students make the same decision: study later, sleep less.…
Why maps lie
Every flat map of the world is wrong. This is not carelessness; it is geometry. A sphere cannot be flattened…
The student who tested the counter
Three weeks after the first version appeared, a student in grade nine sent a message to the team: your…
An hour of electricity
Switch on a classroom light and something starts burning, spinning or shining somewhere else. Following that…
What a test can and cannot measure
A test is a measuring instrument, and like any instrument it has a range. A kitchen scale is excellent for…
The average that hides everyone
In the 1950s the United States Air Force had a problem it could not explain. Pilots were losing control of…
Why nobody asks a question
At the end of an explanation a teacher asks whether anyone has a question. Thirty students look at their…
The referee and the replay
Video review arrived in football with a straightforward promise: fewer wrong decisions. By that measure it…
What a map leaves out
Every map is a lie, and a useful one. The surface of a sphere cannot be laid flat without stretching…
The photograph that was not taken
In 2023 a picture of a flooded street in a European city spread across social networks during a storm. It had…
Who owns a photograph of you
A classmate takes a photograph of you at a school event and posts it. Who decides what happens to that…
Reading a percentage
A headline reports that a treatment cuts the risk of a disease by fifty per cent. That sounds decisive.…
The cost of switching
Open a maths exercise. Work for four minutes. Check a message. Return to the maths. How long does it take to…
The village that shared a wall
Economists once taught a confident story about shared resources. If a pasture belongs to nobody, each herder…
The price of a quiet room
Noise is the pollutant people complain about most and regulate least. Unlike smoke it leaves no residue, and…
The backup that did not exist
A small company lost eleven years of records in an afternoon. They had backups. The backups had been running…
The team that talked last
A research group at Google spent two years trying to find what made some teams work better than others. They…
The number that decided a career
Ask adults how they chose their work and a surprising number describe something small: a teacher who said one…
The goalkeeper who stood still
A study of several hundred penalty kicks in professional football found something that ought to change how…
The habit of the second draft
Most students write one draft. They write it, read it once for spelling, and hand it in. The single most…
The shadow on the well
Around 240 BCE a librarian in Alexandria measured the size of the Earth using a stick, a well and some…
The deterrent that did not deter
A school introduced a fine of ten thousand dong for arriving late to the after-school club. The aim was…
The backlog nobody owned
A school office had a backlog of three hundred unanswered emails. Everybody knew about it. Nobody was…
The wind that built a city
Why are so many old cities on the eastern side of their rivers, or the northern side of their hills? The…
The letter that was never sent
Archives contain a particular category of document that historians value more than almost any other: the…
The film that shows its working
Most films hide how they were made. The cut is invisible, the camera is unnoticed, and the audience is…
The word order problem
Vietnamese learners of English make a particular mistake with adjectives, and it is interesting because…
The measure of a forest
Countries report how much forest they have, and the numbers are compared, published and used to judge policy.…
The tax on windows
In 1696 England introduced a tax on windows. The reasoning was sensible: counting windows from the street…
The app that asked too much
A free torch app once requested access to a user's contacts, location and microphone. A torch needs one…
The runner who slowed down
Ask a group of students to run a distance as fast as they can and watch the first hundred metres. Most set…
The test before the lesson
A teacher gives a short test on material the class has not been taught. Students get most of it wrong, which…
The map with no names
A map of a country with the place names removed is still a political document. The lines are the argument.…
The interview with no questions
A manager hiring for a practical job stopped asking questions. Instead, candidates spent ninety minutes doing…
The language of the kitchen
English food words carry a history that most speakers never notice. Cow, pig, sheep and deer are the animals.…
The coin that remembers
A fair coin has landed heads six times in a row. What is the chance the next throw is heads? Most people feel…
The lamp that outlived the plan
A fire station in California has a light bulb that has been burning, almost continuously, since 1901. It is…
The field that was left alone
In 1882 an agricultural research station in England stopped cultivating a wheat field and simply fenced it.…
The athlete who rested
Training does not make you stronger. Recovering from training makes you stronger, and training is what…
The promise that was kept
A village in Kerala agreed in the 1990s that every household would send its daughters to secondary school.…
The cheapest thing in the room
A school was deciding between two projectors. One cost four million dong, the other seven. The cheaper one…
The memory of a smell
A smell can return a memory with a completeness that a photograph rarely manages. The reason is anatomical…
The shape of a good question
Teachers are told to ask good questions and rarely told what makes one good. There are at least three…
The thing that did not change
Lists of the skills employers want have been published for forty years. The technologies on them change…
The notebook and the keyboard
Students taking notes on a laptop write more words than students taking notes by hand. On tests of factual…
The rule that wrote itself
A school banned phones in corridors. The rule was one sentence long and everyone understood it. Three years…
The sculpture that faced the wrong way
A bronze figure stood in a square for ninety years facing the town hall. When the square was redesigned, the…
The queue and the fair share
A clinic replaced its single queue with an appointment system and the waiting room emptied. Complaints rose.…
The first aid that did nothing
Half of what used to be taught as first aid has been removed from the courses, and the removals are more…
The dice that felt wrong
Ask thirty students to write down a made-up sequence of forty coin tosses, and ask thirty more to toss a coin…
The update that broke the printer
A school's printers stopped working after an automatic security update. The update was correct, necessary and…
The habit that survived a holiday
Two groups of adults took up running. Both ran for eight weeks and then went away for two. On returning, one…
The recipe that changed countries
A dish sold in three cities under three names has one ancestor and three different claims of ownership, all…
The class that set its own test
A teacher asked each student to write three exam questions on a topic and to supply the answers. The exercise…
The referee who explained
A league trialled a rule requiring referees to announce the reason for every video review over the public…
The meeting that became an email
A team replaced its weekly status meeting with a written update and gained four hours a week. Six months…
The shop that moved the milk
Supermarkets put milk at the back. The reason is often given as a trick to make shoppers walk past everything…
The switch that had to be ugly
The emergency stop on an industrial machine is a large red mushroom that must be struck rather than pressed,…
The error message that helped
A payment page's error message was changed from 'Transaction failed' to 'Your bank declined this card. Try…