English readings — Science
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.
Why streaks work
A streak is simply the number of days in a row on which you complete a task. It sounds trivial, yet in many…
Exercise and the teenage brain
The World Health Organization advises that young people between five and seventeen should be physically…
The ten-minute rule
When a task feels too big, most people do not start it at all. Psychologists have a simple trick for this,…
Why warming up works
Coaches have told athletes to warm up for a century, but the reasons are more interesting than the habit. A…
Learning from a mistake
Most students hate making mistakes in front of other people. That feeling is natural, but it works against…
Measuring a school day
A class of grade eight students decided to measure how much they actually moved during a normal school day.…
Antibiotics and patience
Antibiotics changed medicine more than almost any other invention of the twentieth century. An infection that…
Sleep and the exam
The night before an important exam, thousands of students make the same decision: study later, sleep less.…
Noise in the classroom
Teachers ask for quiet so often that the request sounds like discipline rather than physics. In fact the…
The island that counted birds
On a small island off the coast of Scotland, volunteers have counted seabirds every June since 1969. They…
Why ice floats
Almost every substance becomes denser as it cools. Water does too, until it reaches about four degrees above…
The thermometer in the sun
Weather stations keep their thermometers inside a white box on legs, with slatted sides, standing at a fixed…
The plant that counts
The Venus flytrap closes on an insect. That much is familiar. What is less known is that it will not close…
The sound of your own voice
Almost everyone dislikes hearing a recording of their own voice. The usual explanation — that we are simply…
The tenuous link
Headlines connecting a food to a disease appear several times a month. Most rest on a link that is real,…
The queue for the microscope
A science teacher in Hai Phong had one working microscope and thirty-two students. The usual arrangement was…
The bread that waits
Bread made in twenty minutes and bread made over twelve hours use the same four ingredients. The difference…
The smell of the classroom
Carbon dioxide is the gas we exhale, and in a closed room full of people it accumulates. Outdoor air contains…
The town that counted cats
A small town wanted to know how many stray cats lived in it. Counting them directly was impossible: cats…
The photograph of the eclipse
In 1919 two expeditions photographed stars near the sun during a total eclipse. The point was to measure…
The herd that was not counted
Counting animals in a forest is harder than it sounds, and the honest methods all begin by admitting that…
The experiment that worked too well
A classroom study of a new teaching method reported an improvement so large that the authors spent most of…
The instrument that drifted
A school's weather station reported that the playground had warmed by 1.4 degrees in six years. The…
What makes a language learner
Ask a hundred people why they never learned a second language and most will say they have no talent for it.…
Sixty active minutes
Health organisations advise young people to be physically active for about sixty minutes a day. Most students…
Learning English like training
Many students study English the way some people exercise: nothing for three weeks, then five hours before a…
Habit over motivation
Ask a class of thirteen-year-olds whether exercise is good for them and every hand goes up. Ask how many…
Measuring what matters
A number on a screen feels like a fact. It is not: it is the end of a long chain of decisions about what to…