IELTS Reading | Cause and Effect in Academic Texts

Cause and effect relationships are an essential element of many academic texts. Understanding these relationships will help you to answer reading questions and also help you to write academic essays in which you have to give causes and effects.
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Cause and effect are often presented in the same sentence. Either the cause or the effect can be at the beginning of the sentence so you have to look for clues in the vocabulary which the writer uses. These clues help you to understand the text effectively.

​Exercise 1

​The following sentences have both cause and effect in the same sentence. Match the cause and effect to the sentence parts a) and b).

Example | Which part of the sentence is cause and which is effect?
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1. a) Countless lives have been saved b) through UN funded vaccination programs worldwide.

View the Answer

1. Countless lives have been saved through UN funded vaccination programs worldwide.

The effect is a) 'Countless lives have been saved...' 
​The cause is b) '...through UN funded vaccination programs worldwide' 

Which is cause and Which is Effect?

Exercise 2

Read the following text and complete the flow chart with the appropriate word or words from the text.

Ancient Egyptian Contributions to Science

The land best known for pyramids and sphynxes, Ramesses and King Tut was also an innovator in science and mathematics.

Ancient Egypt was a land of rural villages and farmers who relied on the annual flooding of the great river Nile to lay a rich layer of sediment on the land, ensuring its fertility in the next growing season. Land was restricted to a narrow fertile area along the banks of the river Nile. The importance of this limited area of fertile land produced advances in geometry which were needed by the Egyptians in order to agree on the boundary of an individual farmer’s piece of land. Improvements in the mathematics of building grew out of this development in mathematics. For example, the geometry required to build rectilinear structures and stone temples. Because of the need for the measurement of land, early on the Egyptians invented the decimal system of counting. It also led to the development of mathematics for calculating volume. This was put to use in a very practical way to calculate the amount of grain a granary could hold and thus how many people could be fed.

The consequence of these early advances in mathematics can be seen realized in the gigantic stone structures of the pyramids at Giza, the largest of which has a base are of 13 acres. In order to construct these huge structures ancient Egyptian builders had to employ their understanding of geometry and volume as well as their understanding of astronomy and social organization.  

Click or touch a word above

Now click or touch a gap below

1.	The Importance of land surveying led to advances in .
2.	Advances in mathematics resulted in better building techniques for buildings.
3.	It also allowed for the pharaoh’s scribes to calculate how much was held in his granaries.
4.	This allowed for an assessment of how many people could be in times of need.
5.	An impressive result of these advances was the construction of the which required the use of many skills.

Now you have the skills to notice cause and effect in text, the next step is to accurately write about cause and effect.

Have a look at our other free Reading Lessons.