Reading: Yes / No / Not Given: IELTS Academic 9990 (IELTS Academic)

Online retailers and travel-booking platforms increasingly set prices not for a market but for an individual: your browsing history, device type, location and even the time you have spent hesitating on a page can all feed into an algorithm that decides what number you see. Companies defend the practice, sometimes called personalised or dynamic pricing, as a natural extension of long-established discounting, a loyalty-card holder pays less than a first-time shopper, and nobody objects to that. I find this comparison unconvincing. A loyalty discount is transparent and available to anyone willing to sign up; algorithmic personalisation is neither. Two customers viewing an identical flight at the identical moment may be shown prices that differ by a significant margin, and neither is told why, nor even that the number in front of them has been individually tailored.

The strongest objection is not that personalised pricing exists but that it is invisible. Regulators in several jurisdictions have begun requiring firms to disclose when a price has been algorithmically customised, and I believe this modest step should become a global minimum standard rather than a patchwork of local rules. Disclosure would not eliminate the practice, but it would at least allow a shopper to recognise that the figure on screen is not a fixed, universal price and to shop accordingly.

Some economists argue that personalised pricing can, in aggregate, lower average prices by allowing firms to charge less to price-sensitive customers who would otherwise not purchase at all. That may well be true, and I do not dispute the underlying economic logic. My concern is narrower: even an efficient practice can be an unfair one if it operates in the dark. A retailer that charges a low-income customer less because an algorithm has inferred their sensitivity to price is not, in my view, offering generosity; it is exploiting a knowledge asymmetry that the customer never consented to. Until transparency is mandatory, I would encourage regulators to treat undisclosed personalised pricing as a form of manipulation rather than a routine commercial technique, whatever efficiency gains its defenders claim on its behalf.

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer? Write YES, NO or NOT GIVEN.

1. The writer regards personalised pricing as essentially the same thing as a loyalty-card discount.
2. The writer supports making disclosure of algorithmically personalised prices a global minimum standard.
3. The writer argues that personalised pricing should be banned outright.
4. The writer accepts that personalised pricing can lower average prices for price-sensitive customers.
5. According to the writer, most online shoppers can currently find out easily when a price they are shown has been personalised.
6. The writer regards efficient pricing practices as automatically fair.
7. The writer believes regulators should treat undisclosed personalised pricing as a form of manipulation.

For decades, zoning codes in cities across North America and much of Europe have required new buildings to include a minimum number of off-street parking spaces, calculated by formulas that vary by land use. The stated purpose was to prevent overspill parking on residential streets, but the practical effect, in my assessment, has been to quietly subsidise car ownership at the expense of almost everything else a city might want to build. A one-bedroom apartment that might otherwise cost relatively little to construct becomes considerably more expensive once a developer is legally obliged to pour concrete for a parking space that may sit empty for most of the day, and that added cost is inevitably passed on to renters and buyers, regardless of whether they own a car.

A growing number of cities, including several that eliminated minimum parking requirements within the last decade, have reported that developers do not stop building parking altogether when the mandate disappears, they simply build the amount that matches actual demand at that specific site, which is often, though not always, less than the old formula demanded. I regard this outcome as evidence that the original requirements were poorly calibrated rather than genuinely necessary, and I would go further: cities that have not yet reformed their parking mandates are wasting land that could otherwise support housing, shops or green space, at a moment when many of the same cities also claim to be facing a housing affordability crisis.

Critics of reform sometimes warn that removing mandates will flood residential streets with parked cars as new buildings free-ride on public kerb space. This is not an unreasonable worry in the abstract, and some neighbourhoods have indeed experienced localised parking pressure after reform. I would argue, however, that kerb-space congestion is best addressed directly, through resident permit schemes or metered pricing, rather than by forcing every new building, whatever its size or location, to build parking it does not need. Reforming the mandate does not require abandoning every other tool a city has for managing its streets.

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer? Write YES, NO or NOT GIVEN.

1. The writer believes minimum parking requirements have mainly served to make housing more affordable for renters and buyers.
2. The writer states that developers typically stop building any parking spaces once minimum requirements are removed.
3. The writer regards the smaller amount of parking built after reform as evidence that the original requirements were poorly calibrated.
4. The writer argues that cities retaining parking mandates are wasting land that could support housing, shops or green space.
5. The writer claims that parking reform, on its own, will completely solve the housing affordability crisis in the cities that adopt it.
6. The writer supports managing kerb-space congestion through tools such as resident permit schemes or metered pricing.
7. The writer believes that reforming parking mandates requires abandoning every other tool a city has for managing its streets.
8. The writer gives the exact percentage by which parking construction has fallen in cities that removed their mandates.

Several influential university league tables now weight a single figure heavily in their formulas: the median salary earned by graduates within a fixed period after leaving, typically two or three years. Newspapers report these rankings uncritically, prospective students consult them when choosing where to apply, and a number of governments have begun tying a portion of institutional funding to graduate earnings data. I regard this trend as a serious misjudgement of what a university education is meant to accomplish, though I readily concede that graduate earnings are not an irrelevant statistic. A degree that leaves its holders unable to find stable employment at all is a legitimate cause for concern, and no defender of higher education should dismiss that concern out of hand.

My objection is to treating early-career salary as a proxy for educational quality more broadly. Salary a few years after graduation is shaped overwhelmingly by the industry a graduate happens to enter, the regional labour market they enter it in, and their socioeconomic starting point, none of which the university itself controls to any meaningful degree. A graduate who becomes a schoolteacher, a social worker or a research scientist in a modestly paid field is not obviously less well-educated than a classmate who becomes a management consultant, yet salary-weighted rankings systematically penalise institutions that produce more of the former and reward those that produce more of the latter. Over time, I believe this creates a perverse incentive for universities to steer students, whether through admissions choices or subtle changes in course offerings, toward degrees that reliably feed high-paying sectors, narrowing the range of subjects on offer in ways that have nothing to do with teaching quality.

Some ranking bodies have responded by introducing a "value-added" salary measure, comparing graduates' earnings against a statistical prediction based on their entry qualifications and background. This is, in my view, a genuine improvement over a raw salary figure, since it at least attempts to isolate the university's own contribution rather than crediting it for the advantages a student already possessed on arrival. Even so, I remain unconvinced that any salary-based metric, however carefully adjusted, should occupy the prominent position it currently holds in how the public judges a university's worth.

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer? Write YES, NO or NOT GIVEN.

1. The writer believes graduate earnings data is entirely irrelevant to judging higher education.
2. The writer thinks salary a few years after graduation is largely determined by the university's own teaching quality.
3. The writer believes a graduate who becomes a schoolteacher is necessarily less well-educated than one who becomes a management consultant.
4. The writer argues that salary-weighted rankings may create an incentive for universities to steer students toward high-paying fields regardless of teaching quality.
5. The writer regards "value-added" salary measures as a genuine improvement over raw salary figures.
6. The writer believes value-added salary measures should now be given the most prominent role in judging a university's worth.
7. The writer specifies which country first introduced government funding tied to graduate salary data.

Unlimited paid time off has become a fashionable perk among technology firms and a growing number of professional service companies, marketed as a signal of trust: rather than accruing a fixed annual allowance, employees are told they may take as much leave as they judge appropriate, provided their work gets done. On paper, the policy sounds like a straightforward improvement over the traditional capped-leave system, and it is often introduced with genuine enthusiasm by management. I am nonetheless sceptical that it delivers what it promises, and the data I have seen from firms that track actual usage tends to support that scepticism rather than the marketing.

Several independent surveys of companies that adopted unlimited leave have found that average days taken per employee fell after the policy was introduced, rather than rising as one might expect from the removal of a cap. The most plausible explanation, and the one I find most convincing, is that a fixed allowance functions as a clear social permission: an employee who is entitled to twenty days feels licensed to take them without needing to justify the decision to colleagues or to themselves. Remove the explicit number, and taking time off becomes a matter of individual judgement about how much is "reasonable", a judgement that many employees resolve, whether consciously or not, by erring on the side of taking less rather than risking the appearance of shirking.

There is a further complication I consider significant: because there is no accrued leave balance under an unlimited policy, a departing employee is not legally owed a cash payout for unused days, unlike under most capped-leave systems where untaken leave typically converts to a payment on exit. I do not believe this financial detail is the primary reason companies adopt unlimited leave, since I have no evidence that cost-saving is the leading motivation cited internally, but I do think it deserves more attention from employees evaluating a job offer than it currently receives. My own preference, for what it is worth, is for a generous but clearly stated minimum number of days that all staff are strongly encouraged, rather than merely permitted, to take.

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer? Write YES, NO or NOT GIVEN.

1. The writer believes unlimited PTO policies are usually introduced by management with genuine enthusiasm.
2. The writer states that employees at companies with unlimited leave take, on average, more days off than before the policy was introduced.
3. The writer believes a fixed number of leave days makes employees feel they need less justification for taking time off.
4. The writer thinks employees under unlimited leave policies typically take more time off than they would under a capped system, out of a sense of freedom.
5. The writer believes that cost-saving on unused-leave payouts is the main reason companies introduce unlimited PTO.
6. The writer thinks the lack of a cash payout for unused leave deserves more attention from employees considering a job offer.
7. The writer prefers a policy with no stated minimum number of leave days at all.
8. The writer specifies the exact percentage decline in average leave days taken after companies adopted unlimited PTO.

A style of reporting known as solutions journalism has gained ground in newsrooms over the past decade, encouraging reporters not merely to document a social problem but to investigate, with the same rigour applied to any other story, responses to that problem that appear to be working somewhere, and why. Critics within the profession have occasionally dismissed the approach as a form of good-news dressing, more concerned with making readers feel better than with holding power to account. I think this criticism misunderstands what the better examples of solutions journalism actually do, and I want to defend the genre against the charge that it is inherently softer or less rigorous than conventional investigative reporting.

A well-executed solutions story does not simply celebrate an initiative; it interrogates the evidence behind a claimed success as sceptically as an investigative reporter would interrogate a claim of wrongdoing; it asks what the intervention cost, who evaluated it, whether the results have been replicated elsewhere, and what trade-offs or failures accompanied it. Done properly, this is demanding, resource-intensive reporting, not a cheaper alternative to the accountability journalism that solutions coverage is sometimes accused of displacing. I am persuaded that newsrooms which frame coverage exclusively around what has gone wrong, without ever examining what has been tried in response, leave readers with an inaccurate picture of a problem's tractability, one that can foster the sense that nothing can be done, a conclusion that is very often untrue and that I believe contributes measurably to public disengagement from civic life.

I would nonetheless caution against one genuine risk: a newsroom under commercial pressure to produce upbeat, shareable content could use the solutions label to justify stories that skip the interrogation stage entirely, reporting a claimed success without checking it, and that failure mode would deserve every criticism levelled at the softer version of the genre. Whether solutions journalism becomes a rigorous complement to traditional reporting or a marketing label attached to uncritical coverage depends, in my view, less on the concept itself than on whether individual newsrooms enforce the same evidentiary standard on solutions stories that they already apply, or claim to apply, to every other kind of story they publish.

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer? Write YES, NO or NOT GIVEN.

1. The writer believes solutions journalism, as practised at its best, is inherently less rigorous than investigative reporting.
2. The writer states that a well-executed solutions story questions the evidence behind a claimed success as sceptically as an investigative reporter would question a claim of wrongdoing.
3. The writer believes coverage that focuses exclusively on what has gone wrong gives readers an accurate picture of a problem.
4. The writer thinks a sense that "nothing can be done" about a social problem is usually an accurate assessment.
5. The writer acknowledges a genuine risk that some newsrooms could use the solutions label to justify unchecked, uncritical stories.
6. The writer names a specific news organisation that has misused the solutions journalism label.
7. The writer believes whether solutions journalism succeeds depends mainly on the evidentiary standards individual newsrooms enforce.

Voluntary carbon-offset markets, in which companies pay for tree-planting or renewable-energy projects to compensate for their own emissions, have expanded rapidly over the past decade, driven largely by corporate pledges to reach "net zero." Proponents present offsetting as a pragmatic bridge, allowing firms to fund emissions reductions elsewhere while they gradually decarbonise their own operations. This defence, however, does not withstand scrutiny. Independent audits of several large offset registries have found that a significant proportion of credited projects would have proceeded regardless of the additional funding, meaning the emissions they claim to have prevented were never genuinely at risk in the first place. A carbon credit sold on that basis represents no real reduction at all, yet it is treated by the purchasing company as equivalent to cutting a tonne of its own emissions.

More troubling still is the incentive structure the market creates. Once a company has purchased enough credits to declare itself "carbon neutral," the pressure to redesign supply chains, switch to cleaner energy sources or curb output largely evaporates; offsetting becomes a substitute for structural change rather than a supplement to it. Some environmental economists have countered that offsetting at least channels capital toward forest protection and renewable infrastructure that would otherwise struggle to attract investment, and that imperfect funding is better than none. That may be true in isolated cases, but it does not justify the market's current scale or the confidence with which "carbon neutral" labels are marketed to consumers.

None of this means every offset project is worthless. Schemes independently verified against rigorous additionality standards, where funding demonstrably enables a project that would not otherwise exist, do deliver genuine reductions and deserve support. The distinction that matters is not whether offsetting occurs but whether a specific project can prove the emissions cut was additional. Regulators have so far been reluctant to mandate such proof, preferring self-reported disclosures that offset providers themselves design. Until independent verification becomes compulsory rather than optional, voluntary carbon markets will keep providing companies with a reputational shortcut that does little to reduce the emissions actually entering the atmosphere.

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer? Write YES, NO or NOT GIVEN.

1. The rapid growth of voluntary carbon-offset markets has mainly been fuelled by corporate net-zero commitments.
2. Audits found that only a small minority of credited offset projects would have proceeded without the offset funding they received.
3. Buying enough carbon credits tends to reduce a company's incentive to make deeper structural changes to its own operations.
4. Renewable-energy offset projects receive more funding worldwide than forest-protection offset projects.
5. Environmental economists first proposed the concept of carbon offsetting in the 1990s.
6. Regulators currently require independent proof that an offset project's emissions savings are additional before credits can be sold.
7. Offset projects that are independently verified against rigorous additionality standards can deliver genuine emissions reductions.

Fast-fashion retailers have transformed the traditional two-season clothing cycle into a near-continuous stream of "micro-collections," often refreshing online catalogues several times a week and pricing individual items low enough to be treated as disposable. The marketing methods driving this shift deserve far more scrutiny than they currently receive. Limited-run drops, countdown timers on product pages and paid partnerships with social-media influencers who post "clothing haul" videos are deliberately engineered to create a sense of urgency and scarcity around garments that are, in reality, neither rare nor especially well made. The effect is to convert ordinary shopping into something closer to compulsive collecting, in which the pleasure lies in acquisition itself rather than in any lasting use of the item purchased.

Industry representatives frequently argue that consumers are simply exercising free choice, and that low prices democratise fashion by allowing shoppers with modest incomes to participate in current trends. This argument sidesteps the deliberate psychological design of the marketing itself; a choice engineered through manufactured scarcity and constant novelty is not the same as a genuinely free one. It is also worth noting that many of the same companies now promoting "conscious" or "recycled" clothing lines continue, in the same breath, to release thousands of new styles a month, a pace utterly incompatible with the slower consumption such lines are supposed to represent. Describing this practice as greenwashing is not an exaggeration but an accurate description of a marketing strategy designed to ease consumer guilt without altering underlying production volumes.

That said, a small number of brands have introduced genuine repair services and resale platforms that extend the working life of garments already sold, and these initiatives, unlike the recycled-fabric marketing that usually accompanies them, represent a real reduction in the number of new items a customer needs to buy. Such schemes remain a minor part of most retailers' revenue, but they show that an alternative business model, built around durability rather than turnover, is at least commercially possible. Whether major fast-fashion retailers will ever adopt that model at scale is, for now, an open question.

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer? Write YES, NO or NOT GIVEN.

1. Fast-fashion retailers now update their online catalogues almost continuously rather than following the traditional two-season cycle.
2. Countdown timers and limited-run drops are deliberately designed to create a sense of urgency among shoppers.
3. The low prices offered by fast-fashion retailers give shoppers on modest incomes genuine free choice in what they buy.
4. Fast-fashion companies that market "recycled" clothing lines have reduced the total number of new styles they release each month.
5. Repair services and resale platforms introduced by some brands genuinely extend the working life of garments already sold.
6. Government regulators in the European Union have proposed mandatory labelling requirements for the environmental impact of clothing.
7. The influencer marketing strategy used by fast-fashion brands originated in the cosmetics industry.

Visitor numbers at many of the world's most photographed natural landmarks have risen so sharply over the past fifteen years that the qualities which first drew tourists there are now being eroded by the tourists themselves. A slot canyon that received a few dozen hikers a day in the 1990s may now admit several thousand, with paths widened, vegetation trampled and wildlife pushed permanently away from areas once considered core habitat. Local tourism boards have generally resisted capping visitor numbers, arguing that the revenue generated by ever-larger crowds funds conservation work that would otherwise be impossible, and that restricting access simply displaces tourists, and the associated environmental cost, to a neighbouring, less-protected site. This reasoning does not hold up against the evidence from the handful of sites that have actually introduced strict daily caps combined with timed-entry permits.

Where caps have been enforced rigorously, measurable ecological recovery has followed within a few seasons: vegetation regrows along informal trails, and species sensitive to noise and foot traffic return to areas they had abandoned. The claim that capped sites merely export their tourism problem elsewhere also overstates the case; total regional visitor numbers at several capped destinations have fallen rather than simply relocated, suggesting that a meaningful share of visitors were drawn by the specific site's reputation rather than by a general desire to visit that region regardless of destination. Permit systems do reduce short-term revenue for surrounding businesses used to unrestricted foot traffic, and this transitional cost is real and ought to be softened with support for affected operators, but it is a poor argument for abandoning caps altogether.

Sceptics of visitor caps often point to the administrative cost of running a permit system, arguing that ticketing infrastructure and staff to enforce limits consume a large share of the very revenue the caps are meant to protect. Detailed cost breakdowns from operating sites have not yet been published widely enough to evaluate this claim one way or the other. What can be said with more confidence is that sites which have delayed introducing caps, waiting for visitor numbers to fall on their own, have instead seen consistent year-on-year growth in footfall, with no natural levelling-off in sight. Waiting, in other words, is not a neutral option; every season without a cap adds to the damage a cap will eventually have to help reverse.

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer? Write YES, NO or NOT GIVEN.

1. Visitor numbers at some natural landmarks have risen sharply over the past fifteen years.
2. Local tourism boards have generally supported strict caps on visitor numbers.
3. Restricting access to a popular site always simply displaces tourists and environmental damage to a neighbouring site.
4. Ecological recovery has been observed within a few seasons at sites where strict daily caps were rigorously enforced.
5. The administrative costs of running a permit system have been shown, through published cost breakdowns, to consume most of the revenue caps generate.
6. Sites that delayed introducing visitor caps have generally seen visitor numbers level off naturally over time.
7. Short-term revenue losses for local businesses following the introduction of permit systems are real and deserve support measures.
8. Slot canyons were the first landmark type to introduce a timed-entry permit system.

Minimum unit pricing, which sets a legal floor price per unit of alcohol regardless of brand or where it is sold, has been introduced in a small number of jurisdictions as a targeted response to alcohol-related hospital admissions. Unlike a general alcohol tax, which raises the price of every drink roughly in proportion to its existing cost, a minimum unit price affects almost exclusively the cheapest, highest-strength products, precisely the drinks favoured by the heaviest consumers, while leaving the price of moderately priced wine and craft beer largely untouched. This precision is the policy's central strength, and it is one that blanket taxation cannot replicate.

Critics of the policy warn that it disproportionately penalises low-income drinkers, who make up a large share of the customer base for the cheapest products, while wealthier heavy drinkers who favour premium brands are barely affected by the floor price. There is a genuine equity concern buried in this criticism, but it rests on treating all low-income drinkers as a single group, when in fact the health evidence available so far shows that moderate drinkers at every income level change their purchasing very little in response to a minimum price, while it is specifically the small subset of dependent, high-volume drinkers, across income levels, who reduce consumption most sharply. If that pattern holds, the policy's costs fall mainly on those whose drinking was already causing them serious harm, which is a very different distributional outcome from the one critics describe.

None of this settles whether minimum unit pricing is sufficient on its own. Reducing the affordability of the cheapest alcohol does little to address the underlying drivers of dependent drinking, such as unemployment, chronic pain or untreated mental illness, and jurisdictions that have introduced the policy without also expanding addiction treatment services have seen smaller reductions in alcohol-related hospital admissions than those that combined pricing with treatment investment. Whether the policy would remain effective if extended to a much larger, more diverse population than the jurisdictions that have trialled it so far is a question current evidence cannot yet answer with confidence. What can be said is that, as one component of a wider strategy rather than a stand-alone fix, minimum unit pricing achieves something blanket alcohol taxes do not: it targets the price increase specifically at the drinking patterns most linked to serious harm.

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer? Write YES, NO or NOT GIVEN.

1. Minimum unit pricing has been introduced in only a small number of jurisdictions so far.
2. A minimum unit price increases the cost of cheap, high-strength alcohol more than it increases the cost of moderately priced wine or craft beer.
3. Health evidence collected so far shows that moderate drinkers at every income level significantly reduce how much they buy in response to a minimum price.
4. The drinkers who reduce consumption most sharply under minimum unit pricing are mainly dependent, high-volume drinkers across income levels.
5. Jurisdictions that combined minimum unit pricing with increased investment in addiction treatment services saw smaller reductions in alcohol-related hospital admissions than jurisdictions that used pricing alone.
6. Current evidence can confidently predict whether minimum unit pricing would remain effective if extended to a much larger and more diverse population.
7. The impact of minimum unit pricing on alcohol-related crime rates has been shown to be greater than its impact on hospital admissions.
8. The minimum unit price floor set in the jurisdictions discussed applies equally to alcohol sold in bars and alcohol sold in shops.

Museums across Europe and North America hold thousands of objects, from ceremonial masks to funerary sculptures, that were removed from their places of origin during colonial rule, frequently through looting, coerced sale or straightforward seizure by occupying forces. Requests from the governments and communities of origin for the return of these objects have multiplied over the past two decades, and the argument against continuing to hold them by force of historical circumstance grows weaker with each year that passes. An object taken without the consent of the community that made it does not become legitimately owned property simply because a century has elapsed since the taking; the passage of time strengthens custom, not entitlement.

Museum directors who resist repatriation frequently invoke a duty of "universal stewardship," arguing that housing significant objects together in a single, well-resourced institution allows scholars and the wider public far broader access than would be possible if each item were dispersed to its community of origin. This argument treats access for distant visitors as though it were self-evidently more valuable than restoring an object to the community with the deepest connection to it, a premise that is rarely defended rather than simply assumed. It also understates how much conservation and curatorial capacity has grown in the very countries from which these objects were taken; several national museums built in the past fifteen years now meet or exceed the environmental and security standards that Western institutions cite as a precondition for safe display.

None of this means every claim for return is equally strong, or that repatriation should proceed without any conditions attached. Objects whose original community of origin no longer exists in a form capable of receiving and caring for them present a genuinely difficult case, and a small number of returned objects have suffered damage due to inadequate storage facilities at their destination, a risk that deserves serious weight in individual decisions rather than being dismissed. Long-term loan agreements, joint custodianship arrangements and shared conservation funding can address some of these difficulties without requiring outright transfer of ownership in every case, and museums that have experimented with such arrangements deserve credit for treating the underlying claim as legitimate even where full return has not yet occurred. What is no longer defensible is the blanket refusal to negotiate, dressed up as a neutral commitment to preserving universal access.

Do the following statements agree with the claims of the writer? Write YES, NO or NOT GIVEN.

1. Requests for the return of colonial-era artefacts have increased over the past twenty years.
2. An object's ownership becomes legitimate once enough time has passed since it was originally taken without consent.
3. The total number of colonial-era artefacts currently held in these museums has been precisely counted.
4. Museum directors who oppose repatriation typically justify their position by appealing to the idea of universal stewardship.
5. The writer believes that visitor access for distant museum-goers is self-evidently more important than returning an object to its community of origin.
6. Joint custodianship arrangements have completely replaced outright repatriation as the preferred solution in the majority of cases discussed.