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Free IELTS Reading Passage 2 Practice Test

Lume Test

Published on: September 4, 2026

Passage 2 sits between the descriptive Passage 1 and the argumentative Passage 3, and it is where matching headings and matching features most often appear. Both are order-independent tasks, which changes how you work: you cannot move down the passage answering as you go.

Target 20 minutes for this passage. The practice set below runs 13 questions across three task types.

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Key Takeaways

Matching headings and matching features do not follow passage order, so answer them by paragraph, not by question number.
A matching-headings list always has more headings than paragraphs; some are never used.
A heading describes the paragraph’s whole function, not the topic of its most memorable sentence.
Matching features asks you to attribute claims to named people or groups — the names are your search anchors.
Summary completion answers must be words from the passage, in the exact form printed there.

Passage 2: Measuring the value of urban green space

A. Every city planning department now claims that parks pay for themselves. The claim is not empty, but it is remarkably hard to substantiate, because the benefits of a park are diffuse, delayed, and distributed across people who never enter it. A road either carries traffic or it does not. A park produces cooler air, lower stress, higher adjacent property values, more physical activity, better stormwater retention and a set of social effects that resist measurement altogether — and it produces them over decades.

B. The oldest method of putting a number on this is hedonic pricing, which reads the value of a park out of house prices. If two otherwise identical houses differ only in their distance from a park, the price difference is taken as the market’s valuation of park access. The method is elegant and the data are abundant. Its weakness is that it captures only what property markets capitalise, which means it values a park to the people who can afford to live near it and registers nothing for the bus passenger who visits weekly.

C. Contingent valuation takes the opposite approach and simply asks people what they would pay. Survey respondents are presented with a described change — a new park, or the loss of an existing one — and asked to state a willingness to pay. Economists have documented systematic distortions in the answers: respondents give higher figures for a described gain than they will accept for the identical loss, and their stated amounts are influenced by whatever number the survey mentions first. Practitioners defend the method on the grounds that it captures values no market records, which is true, and that the distortions can be corrected, which is contested.

D. A third approach abandons monetary valuation and counts physical outcomes instead. Canopy cover, distance to the nearest accessible green space, minutes of moderate activity per resident per week: these are measurable, comparable between cities, and immune to the framing problems of survey methods. What they cannot do is enter a cost-benefit analysis, because a planning committee choosing between a park and a car park needs both options in the same units. Physical indicators describe the world accurately and then decline to help with the decision.

E. The health economics literature offers a partial bridge. Where a green space demonstrably increases physical activity, and where that activity level is associated with a reduced incidence of specific conditions, the avoided treatment cost can be estimated from health service data. This produces monetary figures grounded in something firmer than survey responses. The chain of inference is long, however, and each link carries an assumption — that the observed activity is additional rather than displaced from elsewhere, that the association is causal, and that the health system would have borne the cost.

F. Displacement is the most persistent of these problems. If a new park attracts joggers who previously ran along the canal, the park has changed where activity happens without changing how much. Studies that compare park users before and after opening are particularly vulnerable, since the users are self-selected. The stronger designs compare whole neighbourhoods rather than park visitors, and a handful compare neighbourhoods that gained a park against otherwise similar neighbourhoods that did not, which is the closest this field comes to an experiment.

G. Distributional questions cut across all of these methods. Cities with more green space per resident are, almost without exception, cities where that green space is unevenly distributed, and the districts with least of it are the districts with the lowest incomes. A citywide average therefore describes a place that no individual resident lives in. Some authorities have responded by setting access standards — a stated maximum distance to accessible green space — rather than area targets, on the grounds that a standard can be failed in a specific place while an average cannot.

H. None of this means valuation should be abandoned. A number that is wrong in a known direction is more useful in a budget meeting than a refusal to produce one, and the alternative to a contested figure is not a better figure but a decision made on other grounds entirely. What the literature does support is modesty: reporting the method alongside the number, stating which benefits the method cannot see, and treating any single valuation as one input rather than as a finding.

Questions 1-6: Matching headings

Choose the correct heading for paragraphs B, C, D, E, F and G from the list below. Write the correct number i-x.

i — Reading value from the housing market
ii — A method that measures accurately but cannot inform a choice
iii — Why averages conceal the problem
iv — The case for abandoning valuation
v — Asking people directly, and what goes wrong
vi — Historical origins of the urban park
vii — Estimating value through avoided illness
viii — Activity that moves rather than increases
ix — International comparisons of park spending
x — The political history of access standards

Paragraph	Your answer
1 — Paragraph B
2 — Paragraph C
3 — Paragraph D
4 — Paragraph E
5 — Paragraph F
6 — Paragraph G

Questions 7-10: Matching features

Match each characteristic with the method it describes. Write A, B, C or D. You may use any letter more than once.

A — hedonic pricing
B — contingent valuation
C — physical indicator counting
D — health economics estimation

Its results are affected by the first figure a respondent is shown.
It produces results that cannot be compared with the cost of an alternative project.
It only registers value where a market records it.
Its results depend on assuming an observed behaviour is additional.

Questions 11-13: Summary completion

Complete the summary. Choose NO MORE THAN TWO WORDS from the passage for each answer.

The most persistent difficulty in health-based estimates is (11) ___, which occurs when a new park changes the location of activity without increasing its quantity. Studies comparing park users before and after opening are especially weak because those users are (12) ___. Some authorities now set access (13) ___ rather than area targets, because these can be failed in a particular place.

Answer key

Q	Answer	Why
1 (B)	i	The paragraph is entirely about deriving park value from house prices
2 (C)	v	Asks willingness to pay, then lists the documented distortions
3 (D)	ii	“measurable, comparable… What they cannot do is enter a cost-benefit analysis”
4 (E)	vii	Avoided treatment cost from reduced incidence of conditions
5 (F)	viii	“changed where activity happens without changing how much”
6 (G)	iii	“A citywide average therefore describes a place that no individual resident lives in”
7	B	“influenced by whatever number the survey mentions first” (C)
8	C	Cannot enter a cost-benefit analysis because the units differ (D)
9	A	“captures only what property markets capitalise” (B)
10	D	“that the observed activity is additional rather than displaced” (E)
11	Displacement	Paragraph F opening
12	self-selected	Paragraph F
13	standards	Paragraph G

The four unused headings, and why

Heading	Why it is not the answer
iv — The case for abandoning valuation	Paragraph H says the opposite: “None of this means valuation should be abandoned”
vi — Historical origins of the urban park	The passage never discusses park history
ix — International comparisons of park spending	Comparability between cities is mentioned in D, but no comparison of spending is made
x — The political history of access standards	G mentions access standards as a current response, not a history

Headings iv and ix are the dangerous ones. Both contain vocabulary that appears in the passage — “abandoning valuation”, “comparisons between cities” — attached to a claim the passage does not make. Matching headings is decided by what the paragraph does, not by which words it shares with the option.

How to work an order-independent task

Read the whole heading list once before touching the passage, and mark any heading that could apply to two paragraphs.
Take one paragraph at a time. Read the first and last sentence, then ask what the paragraph is for: introducing, describing a method, raising an objection, resolving a conflict.
Choose the heading that names that function. If two fit, look for the one that also fits its scope — a heading covering the whole paragraph beats one covering half of it.
Answer the paragraphs you are certain about first and cross those headings off. The list shrinks, and the uncertain ones get easier.
Never leave a heading blank in the hope of a better fit later. There are more headings than paragraphs, so a leftover heading is expected.

Timing for Passage 2

Step	Time	Note
Skim for paragraph function	3 min	One phrase per paragraph in the margin
Matching headings	7 min	Do this while the structure is fresh
Matching features	5 min	Search by the named method, not by the characteristic
Summary completion	4 min	Follows passage order; locate the paragraph first
Transfer	1 min	Write on the sheet as you finish each block
Total	20 min	Leaves 23 minutes for Passage 3

Common errors in these three task types

Error	Where it happens	Fix
Choosing a heading by shared vocabulary	Matching headings	Ask what the paragraph does, not which words it repeats
Assuming each option is used once	Matching features	Read the instruction — letters may repeat
Paraphrasing a completion answer	Summary completion	Copy the passage word exactly, including its form
Working matching tasks in question order	Both matching types	Work paragraph by paragraph instead
Exceeding the word limit	Summary completion	Count the words before writing

FAQ

How long should I spend on IELTS Reading Passage 2?

About 20 minutes. Passage 1 should take around 17 and Passage 3 around 23, which fits the 60 minutes including the time you spend writing answers on the answer sheet.

Are there always more headings than paragraphs?

Yes. Matching headings tasks always include headings that are never used, which is deliberate: it prevents you from arriving at the last paragraph by elimination. Expect leftovers rather than treating them as a sign of error.

How do I choose between two plausible headings?

Ask which one describes what the whole paragraph does rather than what its most striking sentence says. A heading that fits the paragraph’s function and its scope beats one that fits only half of it, and a heading sharing vocabulary with the paragraph is frequently the distractor.

Can a paragraph contain more than one answer in matching information tasks?

Yes, and a paragraph can also contain none. That is why matching information and matching headings do not follow passage order and are better worked paragraph by paragraph.

Do I have to use passage words for summary completion?

Yes, exactly as printed and within the stated word limit. A synonym or a changed grammatical form scores zero even when the meaning is right.

Which question types appear in IELTS Academic Reading?

Eleven in total: multiple choice, identifying information, identifying a writer’s views or claims, matching information, matching headings, matching features, matching sentence endings, sentence completion, summary or note or table or flow-chart completion, diagram label completion, and short-answer questions.

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