Free IELTS Reading Passage 2 Practice Test

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.

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

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