Cambridge IELTS 11 Academic Reading Test 3

• 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 11 Test 3 stitches together fabric history, animal travel and mathematical curiosity. Passage 1, The story of silk, traces the cloth from legendary Chinese origins to the global Silk Road. Passage 2, Great Migrations, defines what counts as true migration in the animal kingdom and explores the cues and rewards that drive it. Passage 3 is the preface to How the other half thinks: Adventures in mathematical reasoning, and discusses why some advanced mathematics is genuinely accessible.

Note completion dominates Passage 1 with nine gaps plus four True/False/Not Given — these gaps are heavily paraphrased, so read each line of the notes side by side with the relevant paragraph. Passage 2 combines five True/False/Not Given, four sentence endings and a four-gap summary. Passage 3 is unusual: it carries an eight-item classifying-style task plus six sentence completions tied to a reflective text where vocabulary is the friction.

Aim for sixteen minutes on silk, twenty on migrations, twenty-three on the maths preface, leaving three minutes for transfer. Save the preface for last so you have a clear head for its more abstract argument. Migration patterns repeat; make sure your timing one does too.

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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