English readings at level C1+
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.
Open source and the commons
Much of the software running the modern world is written by people who are not paid for it and given away to…
The exam that measured the wrong thing
A national reading test was introduced with a sensible aim: to find out whether eleven-year-olds could read…
The last speaker
A language is declared extinct when its last fluent speaker dies. Linguists estimate that this happens…
The machine that could not say no
Ask a language model a factual question it has no basis for answering, and the older ones would answer…
The last exam
The Chinese imperial examination, in some form, ran for about thirteen centuries. At its height it was the…
The precedent that was narrow
A court decided a case about a photograph taken in a park, and within a year the judgment was being cited in…
The evidence that was inadmissible
A confession obtained without a lawyer present was excluded, and the accused was acquitted. The confession…
The poll that moved the vote
Publishing a poll changes the thing the poll measures, and the direction of the change is not consistent. Two…
The translation that added a footnote
A novel's first sentence contains a pronoun that marks the speaker as younger than the person addressed, and…
The footnote that held the argument
A student's essay was returned with a single comment: the argument is in footnote four, and it should be in…
The population that was estimated twice
Two respected estimates of a city's population in 1650 differ by a factor of three. Both are defensible, and…
The screening that found too much
A screening programme detected three times as many cases of a cancer as had been diagnosed before it began.…
The rehearsal that changed the text
A play printed in 1623 contains a line that makes no sense, and three centuries of editors have proposed…