Cambridge IELTS 10 Academic Reading Test 4

• Read each passage carefully. You can highlight text by selecting and right-clicking.
• Answer all 40 questions. Move freely between parts using the question palette.
• Submit before time runs out — auto-submit at 60:00.

Cambridge 10 Test 4 deals with risk, reinvention and reversal. Passage 1, The megafires of California, links drought, suburban expansion and tinder accumulation to the rise in catastrophic wildfires. Passage 2, Second nature, argues against the long-held idea that personality is fixed, drawing on experiments in changing temperament. Passage 3, When evolution runs backwards, presents the controversial idea that ancestral traits can resurface in modern species.

This is a completion-heavy paper. Passage 1 begins with six note completions and seven True/False/Not Given — note completions reward you for finding the section first, then the gap. Passage 2 mixes a five-gap summary, four-item matching of researchers and four classifying questions; the classifying block is the trickiest because all options sound plausible at a skim. Passage 3 has multiple choice, sentence endings and four Yes/No/Not Given items where the writer signals doubt with hedging language — watch for that.

Plan eighteen minutes on wildfires, nineteen on personality, twenty-three on evolution, with three minutes for transfer. Pace yourself with the question types you find easiest first within each passage. Some traits return; bad timing habits don't have to.

New to this skill? Read the Reading question types guide for tactics, scoring rules, and frequency analysis across Cambridge 10–20. Or browse all Reading practice tests.

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