It’s been a long time since I actually posted some IELTS resources on this website. These days, I mostly write articles to help people understand the ins and outs of teaching.

Today, though, I put together an IELTS reading practice exercise that I think will help your students to better understand the reading test. I have taken part of an article from the Atlantic about digital advertising and made some questions to go along with it.

ielts reading
High School Student Studying in Library

The questions that I have chosen are common IELTS reading question types. I haven’t written too many, but I think that these would be really useful when incorporated into a lesson. There are multiple-choice questions, T/F/NG, and short answer ones, too.

Anyway, I’ve attached the reading passage, questions, and answers as a Google Doc (which you can download or view online) and I will put some additional thoughts about the lesson plan below.

Reading Passage with Questions

Here is the Google doc of the free IELTS reading activity.

You are free to download, print, and use this as you wish. The text remains the copyright of The Atlantic.

A Reading Lesson Plan

I recommend that you incorporate this free IELTS reading activity into a lesson by using some of the following ideas.

I would personally start the lesson by showing a screenshot of a website with digital ads displayed. Turn off Adblocker if you use it, of course.

Then ask some questions to get the students into the right frame of mind. Keep those questions general – Have you ever bought anything after seeing an advert? What do you think of digital adverts? etc.

You can introduce some vocabulary at this point, too. Perhaps explain the lexical set: advert, advertising, advertisement, ad, etc.

Next, you might want to show the headline of the article or ask your students if they have heard about the recent controversy with Mark Zuckerberg defending a zero fact-checking policy for political ads, while Jack Dorsey took the opposite approach and outright banned them.

In my document above, I have only included typical IELTS reading questions. I have not done any basic skimming/scanning activities or included any questions about finding the gist of the article. I’d recommend doing this in your class before you get into the finer points.

This lesson is not an authentic IELTS reading task and so you shouldn’t treat it that way. I’d personally go through the questions with my students and show them how to answer each question, looking for the right paragraph question-by-question.

Video Explanation

I have also made this lesson into a video on YouTube. It’s not exactly ideal for classroom use, but it shows the reason why certain answers are correct and explains how to find them in a long text. It might prove useful for some of you.