English readings — Economics
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 economics of a school platform
Why can a student team give away software that a company would sell? The answer lies in the cost structure of…
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…
The price of attention
A service that costs nothing still has a price, and in the case of most apps the price is attention.…
The library that lends things
A library lends books. In about a hundred cities, libraries now lend other things too: drills, sewing…
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…
The shop with no prices
A student-run shop in a secondary school sold snacks at break. In its first term it lost money, which puzzled…
The canteen queue
Every school canteen has the same problem. Everybody arrives at once, the queue reaches the door, and by the…
The pencil nobody can make
Pick up a pencil. It costs almost nothing. Now try to find one person on earth who knows how to make it. The…
The money in the jar
A simple experiment has been repeated in many countries. People are given a sum of money and asked to divide…
The cost of being early
Business history is usually told as a story of first movers, and the story is mostly false. The first company…
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 colour of the package
Two identical products sit on a shelf. One sells twice as well. Frequently the difference is nothing to do…
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 cost of free delivery
An online seller offers free delivery above a threshold. A shopper with eighty thousand dong in the basket…
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 subsidy that raised the price
A government offered buyers a grant of twenty per cent towards a product. Within eight months the list price…
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 insurance that made people careless
A scheme that reimbursed the full cost of replacing stolen bicycles saw theft claims rise by a third in its…
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 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 economics of free
Nothing is free; some things are only free to the person using them. FitForm League costs a student nothing,…