English readings — Health
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 twenty-minute rule
Most advice about exercise assumes you have an hour, a gym and a change of clothes. Most students have none…
The water bottle experiment
A class in Da Nang tried a small experiment for three weeks. Every student brought a one-litre bottle to…
Ten minutes before bed
Ask a group of fifteen-year-olds how they fall asleep and most will describe the same scene: lying in bed…
The first rule of first aid
Every first aid course begins with the same instruction, and students are always slightly disappointed by it.…
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 medicine that tasted wrong
A programme distributing a nutritional supplement in several districts reported a strange pattern. Uptake was…
The weight of the backpack
A survey of secondary school students found that the average bag weighed about twelve per cent of the…
The clinic at the market
A district health service wanted more adults screened for high blood pressure. The clinic was free, well…
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 waiting list that grew shorter
A hospital department cut its average wait from fourteen weeks to six without seeing a single extra patient…
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 cohort that was followed
A study that followed twelve thousand people for thirty years produced a finding that no trial could have…
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 guideline that was updated
A clinical guideline changed its advice, and the newspapers reported that doctors had been wrong for twenty…