AcademIELTS Original — 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.

The third Originals paper covers community action, cognition and democracy in three contemporary topics. Passage 1 introduces the repair café movement, beginning with a Saturday morning in Amsterdam in 2009 and tracing its growth into a global volunteer network for fixing toasters, lamps and bicycles. Passage 2 surveys what neuroscience now knows about how memories consolidate during sleep, from Quintilian's observations in the first century to modern slow-wave research. Passage 3 explores the surprising mathematics behind voting systems and how the choice of counting method can shape election outcomes.

Question types are evenly weighted: True/False/Not Given and note completion at the start, then matching information, sentence completion and multiple choice mid-paper, finishing with headings, multiple choice and a six-gap summary on voting paradoxes. The voting passage is the densest in technical vocabulary, so do the headings first to map the structure before tackling the summary, where paraphrase will be heavy.

Target fourteen minutes on repair cafés, twenty on memory and sleep, and twenty-three on voting, with the final three minutes for transfer and spelling checks. Reading is itself a slow-wave activity — let the structure of each passage settle before you commit answers.