Short answer: you cannot forecast a Reading passage, and anyone selling you one is guessing.
What you can forecast is the subject area, and those repeat: sustainability, technology and its ethics, historical linguistics, archaeology and history, animal behaviour and biodiversity, space, and economic history.
The reported shift through 2026 is towards interdisciplinary passages — science with a social or ethical dimension attached — which changes how you should read, not what you should memorise.
How this forecast is made — and why Reading is different
Our Speaking forecast works because a cue card is one sentence and candidates reproduce it exactly.
A Reading passage is 700 to 900 words; nobody recalls it verbatim, and the pool is far larger than the Speaking bank.
So what public candidate recall actually yields for Reading is a topic label — "one about salt", "one about asteroid missions" — and sometimes the question types used.
That is still worth having, for one reason: unfamiliar subject matter is the single biggest avoidable cost in the Reading paper. Nobody needs background knowledge to answer an IELTS question — every answer is in the text — but a candidate meeting the vocabulary of plate tectonics for the first time under exam pressure reads 30% slower, and Reading is a paper you lose on the clock.
Knowing which areas recur tells you which vocabularies to have met before.
The same honest limits apply as to every forecast here: reports are self-selected, they vary by market and date, and this is a rehearsal list, not a prediction.
Areas reported through 2026
Grouped, with a practice passage in each so this page is something you can act on rather than a list to read.
Every passage below is generated in the Cambridge style at the real length and marked with the trap behind each wrong answer.
| Reported area | Typical angle | Practise on |
|---|---|---|
| Sustainability and energy | Ocean renewables, the economics of transition | Renewable energy · Climate change |
| Technology and its ethics | Screen versus paper reading, automation, data | Technology · Artificial intelligence |
| Animal behaviour and biodiversity | Social insects, endangered species, migration | Animals · Biodiversity |
| History and archaeology | Roman history, the history of a commodity such as salt | History · Archaeology |
| Space and exploration | Asteroid missions, observation programmes | Space |
| Linguistics | Historical linguistics, language change and loss | Linguistics |
| Economics and enterprise | Start-up ecosystems, trade history | Economics |
| Oceans and water | Marine ecology, water management | Ocean · Water |
Nothing there is exotic, and that is the point. Cambridge draws Academic Reading from the same handful of undergraduate-adjacent fields it always has; the labels barely move year to year.
The interdisciplinary shift, and what it changes
The one genuine change reported through 2026 is that passages increasingly combine a hard-science or historical subject with a contemporary social or ethical argument — the biology of a species alongside the policy of protecting it, the engineering of a technology alongside its effect on how people read or work.
That matters for technique rather than knowledge, in two specific ways.
Yes / No / Not Given gets harder. A passage that mixes description with argument contains claims the writer holds, which is what Yes/No/Not Given tests — as opposed to True/False/Not Given, which tests factual agreement.
Candidates who have only drilled the factual version misread the task. Our guides to True/False/Not Given and Yes/No/Not Given cover the difference, and it is worth being certain about before test day.
Matching headings gets more discriminating. When a paragraph carries both a fact and an attitude to it, two headings look plausible and only one matches the paragraph's purpose.
That is the skill our matching headings guide drills.
How to use a topic forecast without wasting time
Do not study the subjects. You are not being tested on asteroids, and an hour spent reading about asteroids buys you almost nothing.
Spend the time on the vocabulary of unfamiliar academic registers instead.
Read one 800-word article a day in an area from the table you would normally avoid, and note the words that slowed you down rather than the facts.
Ten days of that removes most of the reading-speed penalty, and it transfers to any passage in the same register.
Our topic vocabulary tables are built for exactly this — 30 band-7+ words per area with the collocations attached.
Then practise under the clock, because Reading is a time paper before it is a comprehension paper.
Sixty minutes, 40 questions, three passages, no dictionary: sit a full Reading paper and see where the minutes actually go.
When this page changes
Reading areas move far more slowly than Speaking topics do — this list will still be broadly right next year.
We refresh it as reports accumulate and review it each quarter alongside the Speaking and Writing forecasts.