English readings — Society
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 bus that decides
When a school asks why some students stop coming, the answers people expect are about motivation or family…
The bicycle and the city
In 1970 Amsterdam was a city of cars. Photographs from that year show the main squares used as car parks and…
The village that shared a wall
Economists once taught a confident story about shared resources. If a pasture belongs to nobody, each herder…
The cost of a free bus
Several cities have made public transport free. The results are more interesting than either side of the…
The silence after the question
In 1951 Solomon Asch asked groups of students to judge which of three lines matched a reference line. The…
The ambivalent majority
Public arguments are conducted by people with firm views. Most people do not have firm views, and this shapes…
The name on the door
A hospital in Scotland tried an experiment that cost nothing. Staff began writing their first name and role…
The island with two clocks
For most of human history, time was local. Noon was when the sun was highest where you stood, which meant…
The promise that was kept
A village in Kerala agreed in the 1990s that every household would send its daughters to secondary school.…
The benefit of the doubt
A driver cuts in front of you. The immediate explanation is that they are selfish. If you later cut in front…
The accent in the interview
Two recordings of the same answer, read by the same actor in two accents, were played to a hundred people…
The queue and the fair share
A clinic replaced its single queue with an appointment system and the waiting room emptied. Complaints rose.…
The census that missed a street
A national census undercounted one city district by an estimated eleven per cent. The questionnaires were…