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.
The photo that proves nothing
A photograph used to be a kind of evidence. If you had a picture of an event, the event happened. That…
Measuring a school day
A class of grade eight students decided to measure how much they actually moved during a normal school day.…
Where your food comes from
A plate of rice, vegetables and fish looks local, and much of it is. But the inputs behind it travel further…
Reading a painting
Standing in front of a painting for the first time can feel like being asked a question you did not prepare…
What makes a city walkable
Planners have a word for how easy it is to get around on foot: walkability. It sounds vague, but it can be…
Noise in the classroom
Teachers ask for quiet so often that the request sounds like discipline rather than physics. In fact the…
What a budget reveals
People say what they value; a budget shows it. Reading one is a skill worth having before you are old enough…
Why a correction travels slowly
In 2018 a group of researchers tracked how stories spread across a large social network. Their central…
Salt in the rice field
A delta is a negotiation between a river and the sea, and for most of recorded history the Mekong won. Fresh…
The rule that nobody reads
Every app a student installs asks for agreement to a document that almost nobody opens. Researchers who have…
The work that did not exist
A reasonable way to think about future work is to look backwards. The jobs held by people now in their…
The comment you never see
Every large platform decides, thousands of times a second, what you will not see. This is usually described…
The sample of one
My grandfather smoked and lived to ninety-four. This sentence has ended more arguments about health than any…
The engineer who asked why twice
A pump in a factory kept failing. The maintenance team replaced it four times in two years, each replacement…
The clock and the factory
Before the eighteenth century most people did not know what time it was, and did not need to. Work followed…
Why museums argue about labels
The small card beside an object in a museum looks like the least controversial thing in the building. It is…
The cost of a free bus
Several cities have made public transport free. The results are more interesting than either side of the…
The plant that counts
The Venus flytrap closes on an insect. That much is familiar. What is less known is that it will not close…
The rice that came from nowhere
Between 1960 and 2000 world cereal production roughly tripled while the area farmed grew by about ten per…
Reading a graph backwards
A graph is an argument with a picture around it, and the picture is doing more work than most readers notice.…
The smallest useful change
When a team decides a product needs improving, the instinct is to plan a large release. Several months later…
The water under the field
Beneath a great deal of farmland lies an aquifer: a layer of rock holding water that fell as rain, in some…
The prognosis and the diagnosis
Two words are often used as though they meant the same thing. A diagnosis says what the illness is. A…
The arable land that moved uphill
Maps of where crops grow are usually treated as fixed features of a country. Over a human lifetime they move,…
The contingency nobody wrote down
Every plan contains an assumption about what will not go wrong. Most of the time the assumption holds, which…
In praise of working slowly
Speed is treated as a proxy for ability in almost every classroom. The student who finishes first is assumed…
The ambivalent majority
Public arguments are conducted by people with firm views. Most people do not have firm views, and this shapes…
The price of the last seat
Two passengers on the same flight, in identical seats, frequently paid very different amounts. This is not a…
The building that breathes
An office in Harare was built without air conditioning in a climate where air conditioning is normal. It uses…
The medicine that tasted wrong
A programme distributing a nutritional supplement in several districts reported a strange pattern. Uptake was…
The second opinion
In several professions, an expensive decision requires a second person to look independently before it is…
The practice that felt worse
Two groups of students practised the same material for the same length of time. One group studied each topic…
The thousand-year flood
A town is told its new defences will protect against a thousand-year flood. Two years later the town floods.…
The colour of the package
Two identical products sit on a shelf. One sells twice as well. Frequently the difference is nothing to do…
The committee of one
A common piece of workplace folklore says that decisions should be made by groups because groups are wiser…
The cost of a small font
A government form was redesigned and the number of errors fell by about a third. No wording changed. The…
The invisible repair
A bridge that has never failed receives no praise. A bridge that fails and is rebuilt produces headlines, a…
The smell of the classroom
Carbon dioxide is the gas we exhale, and in a closed room full of people it accumulates. Outdoor air contains…
The island with two clocks
For most of human history, time was local. Noon was when the sun was highest where you stood, which meant…
Thinking in the other language
A curious finding has been replicated several times. People make more consistent decisions about risk when…
The warehouse that walks
In an older warehouse, a worker walks to the shelf. In a newer one, the shelf walks to the worker. Small…
The queue that split itself
Supermarkets have separate queues for each till. Airports and banks mostly use one long queue feeding several…
The stamp that changed the post
Before 1840, British letters were paid for by the person who received them, and the price depended on…
The clinic at the market
A district health service wanted more adults screened for high blood pressure. The clinic was free, well…
The benefit of the doubt
A driver cuts in front of you. The immediate explanation is that they are selfish. If you later cut in front…
The cost of free delivery
An online seller offers free delivery above a threshold. A shopper with eighty thousand dong in the basket…
The last mile of the road
A road connecting two cities is usually built to the same standard along its whole length. The final…
The inspection that found nothing
A food safety inspector visits a kitchen and finds nothing wrong. Two weeks later the same kitchen causes an…
The headline that was true
'Cycling deaths rise by fifty per cent' is a true statement about a town where the number went from two to…
The correction on page nine
A newspaper printed a wrong figure on its front page. The correction appeared eleven days later in a box at…
The painting that was cleaned
When a gallery cleaned a seventeenth-century portrait, the sky turned from brown to blue and the public…
The museum with one object
A small museum tried an experiment. For one month it displayed a single object in an otherwise empty room: a…
The word that moved house
'Nice' once meant foolish. Before that, in Latin, it meant not knowing. Its journey to the compliment it is…
The accent in the interview
Two recordings of the same answer, read by the same actor in two accents, were played to a hundred people…
The bus stop that moved fifty metres
Moving a bus stop fifty metres down the road cut use of that stop by a fifth. The buses were the same, the…
The city that cooled itself
On an August afternoon the difference between two streets a kilometre apart was eight degrees. One had trees;…
The forest that was planted wrong
Two million trees were planted on a hillside. Eight years later about a tenth were alive, and the soil was in…
The herd that was not counted
Counting animals in a forest is harder than it sounds, and the honest methods all begin by admitting that…
The instrument that drifted
A school's weather station reported that the playground had warmed by 1.4 degrees in six years. The…
The dose that was halved
A clinic halved the dose of a drug for one group of patients and the results were indistinguishable from the…
The calendar that lost eleven days
When Britain changed calendars in 1752, the second of September was followed by the fourteenth. Eleven days…
The monument with a new plaque
A city council spent two years deciding what to do about a statue, and the eventual answer was a second…
The number that was an average of averages
A district reported an average class score of 71 by averaging the averages of its eleven schools. The correct…
The graph with a cut axis
A chart showed support for a proposal rising from 48 to 52 per cent. The bars appeared to triple in height,…
The search that knew too much
Two people searched for the same four words on the same morning and received different first results. Neither…
The password that was too strong
An office required passwords of twelve characters with upper case, lower case, digits and symbols, changed…
The reward that removed the interest
Children who enjoyed drawing were given a certificate each time they drew. When the certificates stopped,…
The silence that was not agreement
A meeting of eleven people approved a plan unanimously. Interviewed separately afterwards, seven of them said…
The second language that came back
A woman who had not spoken her first language since childhood began lessons again at sixty. Within three…
The festival that was invented
A village festival described as centuries old was designed in 1954 by a committee of four people, and the…
The exam that tested reading speed
An examination intended to measure comprehension was found, after analysis, to be measuring reading speed.…
The homework that was marked twice
A department had every piece of work marked by two teachers for one term. The second marks were not reported…
The timetable that was redesigned
A school moved its hardest subjects to the morning and its results improved in two of them and fell in a…
The substitute who changed the game
A coach made the same substitution in eleven matches and the team scored shortly afterwards in seven of them.…
The record that was a shoe
Between 2017 and 2020, marathon times at the top of the sport improved faster than in any previous three-year…
The injury that was predictable
A club cut its soft-tissue injuries by almost half without changing its medical staff, its physiotherapy or…
The job description that was rewritten
An organisation rewrote one job advertisement and the number of applications from women tripled. The job did…
The reference that said nothing
A reference letter that says a candidate was punctual, pleasant and reliable is usually a refusal to…
The price that ended in nine
Changing a price from 50 to 49 raises sales by more than changing it from 51 to 50, although the second…
The currency in the classroom
A teacher ran a term-long experiment in which students earned tokens for completed work and could spend them…
The bridge that was overbuilt
A footbridge designed for a crowd load it has never carried has stood for sixty years with almost no…
The pump that ran at night
A water utility cut its electricity bill by a fifth without reducing the amount of water it moved. It changed…
The form that lost half its users
A registration form had seven fields and lost about half the people who started it. Six months and several…
The default that decided
Changing a setting's default from off to on moved about seventy per cent of users, and the setting was one…
The queue that was a signal
A restaurant with a nightly queue reduced its seating by a quarter. Revenue rose. The decision looks…
The warehouse that knew the weather
A supermarket chain found that a two-degree rise in forecast temperature changed sales of certain products by…
The interview that was edited
A forty-minute interview became four minutes of broadcast, and the subject complained that she had been…
The phrase that only exists in exams
'Last but not least' appears in examination answers far more often than in anything else written in English,…
The prerequisite that was not one
A course listed a prerequisite that had been added in 1998 and had not been reviewed since. Removing it had…
The group project that was fixed
Group work is defended as preparation for working life and complained about for a specific reason: the mark…
The practice test that came first
A class sat a test on material they had not been taught. They scored almost nothing, and then learned the…
The map that was a claim
A sixteenth-century map shows a river running west where no river runs. The cartographer had never been…
The guideline that was updated
A clinical guideline changed its advice, and the newspapers reported that doctors had been wrong for twenty…
The building that aged well
Two buildings on the same street were completed in the same year. One looks cared for and one looks…
The dashboard nobody read
A team built a dashboard with forty-two charts. Six months later, logs showed that eleven people had opened…
The backup that was never restored
An organisation ran nightly backups for four years without a failure and discovered, on the day it needed…