Free IELTS Reading practice test

A  For most of the twentieth century, beekeeping was regarded as a rural pursuit. Hives belonged in orchards and meadows, far from traffic and concrete. Since the early 2000s, however, rooftops in cities such as London, Paris and New York have become home to thousands of colonies. Hotels, office blocks and even opera houses now advertise their own honey, and city councils have relaxed rules that once made keeping bees in built-up areas difficult or illegal.

B  The trend was driven partly by public concern. Reports of sharp declines in honeybee populations, linked to pesticides, parasites and habitat loss, encouraged many people to believe that keeping bees was a practical way to help. Cities appeared to offer advantages: pesticide use in parks and gardens is often lower than on intensive farmland, and the variety of ornamental plants means that flowers are available for much of the year.

C  Ecologists have since urged caution. Honeybees are a single, managed species, and they are not the pollinators most at risk. Wild bees, including hundreds of species of solitary bees and bumblebees, are far more vulnerable, and they compete with honeybees for the same nectar and pollen. A study in Paris found that as the number of hives rose, the amount of pollen and nectar available to each colony fell, and wild pollinators were recorded less often in the areas with the most hives.

D  Honey yields tell a similar story. In the first years of the boom, urban beekeepers often reported larger harvests than their rural counterparts. As rooftops filled, those yields declined in several cities, a sign that the local supply of flowers had become the limiting factor. Some beekeeping associations now advise members not to add new hives in crowded districts.

E  None of this means that urban beekeeping is harmful in itself. Its most valuable contribution may be educational: a rooftop hive is a powerful way to show office workers and schoolchildren how food production depends on insects. Many experts argue, however, that people who want to support pollinators would achieve more by planting native flowers, leaving areas of grass uncut and avoiding pesticides than by installing another hive.

A  In the 1880s the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus carried out an unusual experiment on himself. He memorised long lists of meaningless syllables, such as "DAX" and "BOK". Because the syllables had no meaning, he could not connect them to anything he already knew, so his results reflected memory alone. He then tested how many he could recall after intervals ranging from twenty minutes to a month. His results produced what is now called the forgetting curve: memory fell steeply in the first hour and the first day, and then declined much more slowly.

B  Ebbinghaus also noticed something more encouraging. When he relearned a list he had partly forgotten, it took less time than learning it originally, and after each relearning session the rate of forgetting slowed. This observation is the basis of spaced repetition, a technique in which material is reviewed at gradually increasing intervals—for example, after one day, three days, a week and a month.

C  Modern research has confirmed and extended these findings. Studies comparing students who reviewed material in a single long session with those who spread the same amount of study over several days consistently find that spaced learners remember more weeks later, even though the single-session group often feels more confident immediately afterwards. Researchers describe this as an illusion of fluency: information that is easy to recall right now feels well learned, but that ease fades quickly.

D  A second effective technique is retrieval practice. Rather than rereading notes, learners test themselves, for instance by answering questions or explaining an idea from memory. The effort of retrieval strengthens the memory more than passive review. In one well-known experiment, students who read a text once and then took practice tests outperformed students who read the same text four times.

E  These methods are not limited to facts. Language learners can use spaced retrieval for vocabulary and grammar, and even for speaking skills: answering similar questions aloud on several different days helps phrases become automatic. The main obstacle is psychological. Spaced and effortful practice feels slower and harder, so many learners abandon it in favour of methods that feel productive but deliver weaker long-term results.