English readings — Maths & statistics
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 average that hides everyone
In the 1950s the United States Air Force had a problem it could not explain. Pilots were losing control of…
Reading a percentage
A headline reports that a treatment cuts the risk of a disease by fifty per cent. That sounds decisive.…
The sample of one
My grandfather smoked and lived to ninety-four. This sentence has ended more arguments about health than any…
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 thousand-year flood
A town is told its new defences will protect against a thousand-year flood. Two years later the town floods.…
The problem with averages in class
A class average of six out of ten can describe two completely different classes. In the first, almost every…
The coin that remembers
A fair coin has landed heads six times in a row. What is the chance the next throw is heads? Most people feel…
The queue that split itself
Supermarkets have separate queues for each till. Airports and banks mostly use one long queue feeding several…
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 dice that felt wrong
Ask thirty students to write down a made-up sequence of forty coin tosses, and ask thirty more to toss a coin…
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,…