English readings — Environment
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 cost of a plastic bottle
A plastic water bottle costs about five thousand dong. That price covers the plastic, the water, the…
An hour of electricity
Switch on a classroom light and something starts burning, spinning or shining somewhere else. Following that…
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…
What a forest remembers
Two patches of woodland can look identical and be entirely different things. One grew back on abandoned…
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 fish that walked inland
When a new road or dam crosses a river, the fish on either side stop being one population and become two.…
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 measure of a forest
Countries report how much forest they have, and the numbers are compared, published and used to judge policy.…
The river of rubbish
Studies of plastic reaching the sea keep finding the same uncomfortable shape. A small number of rivers carry…
The field that was left alone
In 1882 an agricultural research station in England stopped cultivating a wheat field and simply fenced it.…
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 reservoir and the dry year
A reservoir designed for a one-in-fifty-year drought failed in its thirty-first year. The engineering was…
The cost of cheap energy
Every device in a school hall runs on electricity that came from somewhere, and where it came from has…