🎯 IELTS Placement Test (Academic)
Starting your journey to IELTS Band 7.5? Take this diagnostic test to get an estimated band score and a personal study roadmap.
Before you start
This test uses the same question types as the real IELTS Academic test (computer-delivered format). All material is 100% original AllEnglish4U practice content.
- Do the sections in order: Listening → Reading → Writing. Answer every question you can; leave blank what you truly don’t know – wild guessing makes your band estimate less accurate.
- In the real IELTS, each recording is played ONCE only. For the most accurate result, press play once and don’t pause.
- At the end, enter your name and email to submit your test – your answers and essays go to an AllEnglish4U teacher, who will email you your band estimate, detailed feedback and a study plan within 3 business days.
Listening suggested 15 minutes
🏢 Fairview Lettings – Rental Enquiry
Example – Property type: one-bedroom apartment
1. Name: Daniel
2. Preferred move-in date: 1st of
3. Address: 44 Road
4. Monthly rent: £
5. Included in the rent: water and
6. Floor:
7. Walk to the station: minutes
8. Deposit: £
9. Viewing day: (afternoon)
10. Bring: photo ID and a letter from your
Questions 11–15: choose the correct answer, A, B or C.
16. Introduction
17. Survey results
18. Graphs
19. Case study
20. Conclusion
Reading suggested 35 minutes
On the edge of many large cities, food is now being grown in places that look nothing like farms: windowless buildings, disused warehouses, even underground tunnels. Inside, plants grow in trays stacked in layers from floor to ceiling, bathed in pink-purple light. This is vertical farming, one of the fastest-growing areas of modern agriculture.
The modern idea was popularised by Dickson Despommier, a professor at Columbia University, who in 1999 challenged his students to work out how to feed the population of Manhattan using only rooftop gardens. Their conclusion – that rooftops alone could never produce enough – led Despommier to propose growing food on many levels inside tall buildings instead.
In most vertical farms, plants grow not in soil but with their roots standing in shallow streams of nutrient-rich water, a method known as hydroponics. Because the water is captured and recycled again and again, a vertical farm can use up to 95 per cent less water than a conventional field growing the same crop. The growing rooms are sealed, so insects rarely get inside, which means farmers can do without chemical pesticides altogether.
Supporters point to other advantages. Crops can be harvested all year round, whatever the weather outside. And because vertical farms can be built close to – or even inside – cities, food travels much shorter distances from harvest to plate, arriving fresher and producing fewer transport emissions.
There are, however, serious limits. Stacking plants in layers blocks natural light, so crops depend on LED lamps all year round, and running tens of thousands of lamps is expensive: electricity remains the industry’s largest expense and the chief barrier to profit. This is why almost all commercial vertical farms concentrate on fast-growing leafy crops such as lettuce, spinach and basil, which can be sold at high prices. Crops that need far more energy to grow – wheat, rice, potatoes – remain much too costly to produce indoors.
Despite the challenges, the industry keeps expanding, and large vertical farms now operate in Singapore, Japan and the United Arab Emirates, often in places where farmland or water is scarce. Costs are also moving in the right direction: the price of LED lighting has fallen steadily for two decades, and each new generation of lamps turns more electricity into useful light.
Whether vertical farms will ever feed whole cities is still debated. Some scientists argue that, for staple crops at least, the energy problem may never be solved, and that vertical farming will therefore remain a supplement to field agriculture rather than a replacement for it. Even so, for salad on a city plate in January, the future may well be indoors.
🌱 Vertical farming – key facts
8. Crops grow in trays that are stacked in
9. The plants’ roots stand in streams of nutrient-rich
10. Building farms near cities means food travels shorter
11. Sealed rooms keep insects out, so chemical are unnecessary
12. The falling price of lighting is cutting costs
13. Vertical farming may stay a to ordinary farming, not a replacement
AIn a growing number of school systems, handwriting is quietly disappearing. Several countries no longer require children to master joined-up “cursive” writing, and in many classrooms the skill survives only in the earliest grades. Older students type almost everything, and by university the lecture hall has become a sea of laptops, where a student holding a pen over a paper notebook is the exception. What is striking is how little debate has accompanied the change – as if the pen were simply a piece of obsolete office equipment, retired without ceremony.
BNeuroscientists, however, suggest the pen deserves more respect. Writing a letter by hand is a surprisingly complex act: the brain must recall the letter’s shape, plan a precise sequence of finger movements, and monitor the line as it appears on the page. In a series of experiments, researchers recorded the brain activity of children and young adults using EEG sensors. When participants wrote letters by hand, electrical activity spread across a far wider network of brain regions – areas for movement, vision and memory working together – than when they typed the same letters, since pressing a key involves an identical movement whatever the letter. The researchers concluded that forming letters by hand builds richer memory traces, which appear to support letter recognition and early reading.
CThe benefits may continue long after children learn their alphabet. In a well-known series of studies, university students attended lectures and took notes either on laptops or in longhand. Because typing is fast, laptop users tended to transcribe the lecture almost word for word; the pen-users, who could not keep up, were forced to select, condense and rephrase as they listened. When both groups were later tested on factual details, the results were close – but on conceptual questions, which required real understanding, the longhand group performed clearly better. Psychologists describe this as a “desirable difficulty”: the very slowness of the pen demands deeper processing, and that extra effort is what makes the material stick.
DNone of this means the keyboard is the enemy. Typing is faster, and speed matters when the goal is to capture a large volume of information or produce a long document. Typed notes can be searched, shared and reorganised in seconds. For students with dysgraphia or other motor difficulties, the keyboard removes a genuine barrier, turning writing from a painful obstacle into a usable tool. Fluent typists also point out that automatic typing frees working memory: when your fingers know the keys, all your attention can go to the ideas. And there is a danger, some researchers warn, in romanticising the past – every new tool, from the printing press to the calculator, once provoked similar fears, most of which now look quaint.
EThe sensible conclusion is not a war between pen and keyboard but a division of labour. Use the keyboard for volume: long essays, editing, collaborative documents. Reach for the pen when depth matters: meeting new material for the first time, learning a language, sketching the structure of an argument. Some universities now encourage exactly this mix, suggesting handwritten first drafts or laptop-free discussion sections. The real question, researchers argue, is no longer which tool is better, but which tool is better for this task – and children, they add, should leave school fluent in both.
14. Paragraph A
15. Paragraph B
16. Paragraph C
17. Paragraph D
18. Paragraph E
Writing suggested 60 minutes (teacher-assessed – sent with your results)
More and more university students are using artificial intelligence tools to help with their written work.
What problems might this create for students and for universities? What solutions can you suggest?
Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.
📋 Writing band guide (for teachers – IELTS criteria)
| Criterion | ≈ Band 5 | ≈ Band 6 | ≈ Band 7 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Task Achievement / Response | addresses the task only partly; position unclear; details missing or inaccurate | addresses all parts, though some more fully than others; relevant main ideas but thinly developed | covers all parts with a clear position throughout; main ideas extended and supported |
| Coherence & Cohesion | some organisation; linkers repetitive or faulty; paragraphing inadequate | clear overall progression; cohesive devices used but sometimes mechanical | logical organisation; a range of cohesive devices used flexibly; clear central topic per paragraph |
| Lexical Resource | limited but minimally adequate; noticeable errors that may strain the reader | adequate range; some less common items but with occasional inaccuracy | sufficient range for flexibility and precision; less common collocations; occasional slips only |
| Grammatical Range & Accuracy | limited range; frequent errors, some causing difficulty | mix of simple and complex forms; errors rarely block meaning | variety of complex structures; frequent error-free sentences; good control |
Score each task on the 4 criteria, average, then weight Task 2 ×2 : Task 1 ×1. Use the Writing band to confirm or adjust the auto overall band by ±0.5–1.0. Under 150/250 words → Task Achievement penalty, as in the real exam.
Speaking 3 recordings · about 5 minutes
Record three short answers here and an AllEnglish4U teacher will listen to them and band your Speaking with the official IELTS criteria – you do not need to book anything first. Find a quiet place, speak naturally, and do not read from a script.
💬 More practice questions (not recorded)
📋 Speaking band guide (for teachers – IELTS criteria)
| Criterion | ≈ Band 5 | ≈ Band 6 | ≈ Band 7 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Fluency & Coherence | keeps going but with noticeable effort, repetition and self-correction | willing to speak at length; some hesitation, repetition or loss of coherence | speaks at length without noticeable effort; hesitation is content-related, not language-related |
| Lexical Resource | talks about familiar and unfamiliar topics with limited flexibility | wide enough vocabulary to discuss topics at length; paraphrases successfully | flexible vocabulary; some idiomatic language; effective paraphrase |
| Grammatical Range & Accuracy | basic sentence forms fairly controlled; complex forms contain errors | mix of simple and complex structures, with some errors | range of complex structures used with some flexibility; frequent error-free sentences |
| Pronunciation | generally understood; mispronunciations require some listener effort | clear overall; some features of connected speech; accent affects meaning only occasionally | easy to understand throughout; effective use of stress and intonation |
Average the 4 criteria to the nearest 0.5 band. Combine with the auto result and the Writing band for the final placement decision.
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📜 Listening transcripts (open only AFTER you finish)
Recording 1 – Fairview Lettings.
Emma: Good morning, Fairview Lettings, Emma speaking. How can I help?
Daniel: Oh, hello. I’m calling about the one-bedroom apartment on your website – is it still available?
Emma: We have two one-bedroom flats at the moment. Can I take some details first? What’s your name, please?
Daniel: It’s Daniel Seaton.
Emma: Could you spell the surname for me?
Daniel: Of course – S-E-A-T-O-N.
Emma: Thank you. And when would you want to move in?
Daniel: My current contract finishes at the end of August, so ideally the first of September.
Emma: The first of September… that works for the flat on Alder Road – that’s number forty-four Alder Road, A-L-D-E-R.
Daniel: Is that the one at six hundred and sixty-five a month?
Emma: That one’s already reserved, I’m afraid. The Alder Road flat is six hundred and forty.
Daniel: Six forty – better for me, actually. Does that include any bills?
Emma: Water and internet are included. Electricity is separate – you’d set that up yourself.
Daniel: Fine. And which floor is it on? I saw one advertised on the second floor.
Emma: The second-floor one has gone, sorry. This one is on the third floor – but there’s a lift, and the view is much nicer.
Daniel: No problem. How far is it from the station?
Emma: It’s an eight-minute walk to Milldown Station, and buses stop right outside.
Daniel: Great. What about the deposit?
Emma: The deposit is eight hundred pounds, held in a government protection scheme.
Daniel: OK. Could I view it this week? Wednesday afternoon would suit me.
Emma: Ah – on Wednesdays the building manager isn’t there. Could you manage Thursday instead? Any time after two.
Daniel: Thursday’s fine. Should I bring anything?
Emma: Just some photo ID, and a letter from your employer confirming your salary – we ask every applicant for that.
Daniel: Perfect. See you on Thursday. Thanks, Emma.
Recording 2 – Mia & Tom’s presentation.
Mia: Right, Tom – Friday’s getting close. How are you feeling about the presentation?
Tom: Mostly good. You know, people keep assuming I picked sleep and memory because of that documentary everyone’s watching – but honestly, I just chose it from Dr Hale’s list. It was the only topic nobody else had taken.
Mia: Well, it’s worked out. OK – the survey. Forty students replied, which is more than I expected.
Tom: The number’s fine. The real problem is question three: half the class answered about weekday sleep and the other half about weekends. We worded it badly.
Mia: Agreed – that’s our weak point, not the sample size. Now, can I raise the case study? I think it takes up far too much time. Six slides, Tom. Six.
Tom: Noted! Let’s decide what to do with it when we go through section by section.
Mia: Fine. And before Friday, I really think we should run the whole thing through twice, timed on your phone.
Tom: Better than emailing Dr Hale again – she never replies before the weekend anyway.
Mia: Exactly. And remember it’s fifteen minutes maximum this term – it used to be twenty, but they cut it because there are more groups now.
Narrator: Before you hear the rest of the discussion, you have some time to look at questions 16 to 20. Pause now if you need more time.
Tom: OK, section by section. The introduction?
Mia: Don’t touch it. The opening joke works, the outline is clear – it stays exactly as it is.
Tom: Next, the survey results. What do we do about the question-three problem?
Mia: We’re honest about it – and I’ll add the extra table comparing first-years and second-years. More data makes it more credible, not less.
Tom: Good. The graphs – we’ve got five, and three of them show basically the same downward trend.
Mia: Keep the clearest one, drop the other two. Two slides of graphs is plenty.
Tom: Done. The case study – you said it’s too long, but it’s the most memorable thing we have. So instead of cutting it, why don’t we move it right to the start, straight after the introduction? Hook everyone early, then show the numbers.
Mia: …Actually, yes. Move it forward, keep it whole.
Tom: And the conclusion?
Mia: Neither of us is happy with it. Let’s take it to Dr Hale at tomorrow’s tutorial and ask exactly what she wants on the final slide – better than guessing.
Tom: Deal.
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