The Ingenuity Gap IELTS Reading Answers

The IELTS Reading section evaluates how well you can comprehend and analyze a variety of texts. You’ll encounter 40 questions based on three passages, testing essential reading skills like skimming, scanning, and identifying main ideas. These passages are sourced from books, journals, and newspapers, covering both academic and general-interest topics.

One such passage is The Ingenuity Gap, which delves into the widening gap between the world’s increasingly complex problems and our ability to generate innovative solutions. It highlights the importance of human creativity in tackling economic, environmental, and technological challenges. Let’s explore the Ingenuity Gap reading passage, along with the questions and answer explanations to help you prepare effectively.

Practice The Ingenuity Gap IELTS Reading Answers below, and for more, try IELTS reading practice tests. But, before you take the test, learn some tips from this video to get that perfect IELTS reading score!

The Ingenuity Gap IELTS Reading Passage

Paragraph 1. Ingenuity, as I define it here, consists not only of ideas for new technologies like computers or drought-resistant crops but, more fundamentally, of ideas for better institutions and social arrangements, like efficient markets and competent governments.

Paragraph 2. How much and what kinds of ingenuity a society requires depends on a range of factors, including the society’s goals and the circumstances within which it must achieve those goals—whether it has a young population or an ageing one, an abundance of natural resources or a scarcity of them, an easy climate or a punishing one, whatever the case may be.

Paragraph 3. How much and what kinds of ingenuity a society supplies also depends on many factors, such as the nature of human inventiveness and understanding, the rewards an economy gives to the producers of useful knowledge, and the strength of political opposition to social and institutional reforms.

Paragraph 4. A good supply of the right kind of ingenuity is essential, but it isn’t, of course, enough by itself. We know that the creation of wealth, for example, depends not only on an adequate supply of useful ideas but also on the availability of other, more conventional factors of production, like capital and labour. Similarly, prosperity, stability and justice usually depend on the resolution, or at least the containment, of major political struggles over wealth and power. Yet, within our economies, ingenuity often supplants labour, and growth in the stock of physical plant is usually accompanied by growth in the stock of ingenuity. And in our political systems, we need great ingenuity to set up institutions that successfully manage struggles over wealth and power. Clearly, our economic and political processes are intimately entangled with the production and use of ingenuity.

Paragraph 5. The past century’s countless incremental changes in our societies around the planet, in our technologies and our interactions with our surrounding natural environments, have accumulated to create a qualitatively new world. Because these changes have accumulated slowly, it’s often hard for us to recognise how profound and sweeping they’ve been. They include far larger and denser populations, much higher per capita consumption of natural resources, and far better and more widely available technologies for the movement of people, materials, and especially information.

Paragraph 6. In combination, these changes have sharply increased the density, intensity, and pace of our interactions with each other; they have greatly increased the burden we place on our natural environment; and they have helped shift power from national and international institutions to individuals in subgroups, such as political special interests and ethnic factions.

Paragraph 7. As a result, people in all walks of life—from our political and business leaders to all of us in our day-to-day—must cope with much more complex, urgent, and often unpredictable circumstances. The management of our relationship with this new world requires immense and ever-increasing amounts of social and technical ingenuity. As we strive to maintain or increase our prosperity and improve the quality of our lives, we must make far more sophisticated decisions and in less time than ever before.

Paragraph 8. When we enhance the performance of any system, from our cars to the planet’s network of financial institutions, we tend to make it more complex. Many of the natural systems critical to our well-being, like the global climate and the oceans, are extraordinarily complex to begin with. We often can’t predict or manage the behaviour of complex systems with much precision because they are often very sensitive to the smallest of changes and perturbations, and their behaviour can flip from one mode to another suddenly and dramatically. In general, as the human-made and natural systems, we depend upon becoming more complex, and as our demands on them increase, the institutions and technologies we use to manage them must become more complex too, which further boosts our need for ingenuity.

Paragraph 9. The good news, though, is that the last century’s stunning changes in our societies and technologies have not just increased our need for ingenuity; they have also produced a huge increase in its supply. The growth and urbanisation of human populations have combined with astonishing new communication and transportation technologies to expand interactions among people and produce larger, more integrated, and more efficient markets. These changes have, in turn, vastly accelerated the generation and delivery of useful ideas.

Paragraph 10. But—and this is the critical “but”—we should not jump to the conclusion that the supply of ingenuity always increases in lockstep with our ingenuity requirement: while it’s true that necessity is often the mother of invention, we can’t always rely on the right kind of ingenuity appearing when and where we need it. In many cases, the complexity and speed of operation of today’s vital economic, social, and ecological systems exceed the human brain’s grasp. Very few of us have more than a rudimentary understanding of how these systems work. They remain fraught with countless “unknown unknowns,” which makes it hard to supply the ingenuity we need to solve problems associated with these systems.

Paragraph 11. In this book, I explore a wide range of other factors that will limit our ability to supply the ingenuity required in the coming century. For example, many people believe that new communication technologies strengthen democracy and will make it easier to find solutions to our societies’ collective problems, but the story is less clear than it seems. The crush of information in our everyday lives is shortening our attention span, limiting the time we have to reflect on critical matters of public policy, and making policy arguments more superficial.

Paragraph 12. Modern markets and science are an important part of the story of how we supply ingenuity. Markets are critically important because they give entrepreneurs an incentive to produce knowledge. As for science, although it seems to face no theoretical limits, at least in the foreseeable future, practical constraints often slow its progress. The cost of scientific research tends to increase as it delves deeper into nature. And science’s rate of advance depends on the characteristics of the natural phenomena it investigates, simply because some phenomena are intrinsically harder to understand than others, so the production of useful new knowledge in these areas can be very slow. Consequently, there is often a critical time lag between the recognition between a problem and the delivery of sufficient ingenuity, in the form of technologies, to solve that problem. Progress in the social sciences is especially slow for reasons we don’t yet understand, but we desperately need better social scientific knowledge to build the sophisticated institutions today’s world demands.

The Ingenuity Gap IELTS Reading Questions

Questions 27-30

27 The definition of ingenuity

28 The requirement for ingenuity

29 The creation of social wealth

30 The stability of society

A depends on many factors including climate

B depends on the management and solution of disputes.

C is not only of technological advance but more of institutional renovation.

D It also depends on the availability of some traditional resources.

Questions 31-33

31 What does the author say about the incremental change of the last 100 years?

A It has become a hot scholastic discussion among environmentalists.

B Its significance is often not noticed.

C It has reshaped the natural environments we live in.

D It benefited a much larger population than ever.

32 The combination of changes has made life:

A easier

B faster

C slower

D less sophisticated

33 What does the author say about natural systems?

A New technologies are being developed to predict change with precision.

B Natural systems are often more sophisticated than other systems.

C Minor alterations may cause natural systems to change dramatically.

D Technological developments have rendered human being more independent of natural systems.

Questions 34-40

34 The demand for ingenuity has been growing during the past 100 years..

35 The ingenuity we have maybe inappropriate for solving problems at hand..

36 There are very few who can understand the complex systems of the present world..

37 More information will help us to make better decisions..

38 The next generation will blame the current government for their conduct..

39 Science tends to develop faster in certain areas than others..

40 Social science develops especially slowly because it is not as important as natural science.

The Ingenuity Gap IELTS Reading Answer Key

 The Ingenuity Gap IELTS Reading Answers With Explanation

Let’s now review the answers to the questions from the passage in the reading section, The Ingenuity Gap IELTS Reading Answers, and assess your improvement for a high IELTS Reading band score.

27. C 

Location: Paragraph 1
Answer Explanation:
The paragraph states, “Ingenuity… consists not only of ideas for new technologies… but, more fundamentally, of ideas for better institutions and social arrangements…” This highlights that ingenuity goes beyond technological advancements and focuses more on institutional and social improvements. Hence, C is the correct answer.

28. A  

Location: Paragraph 2
Answer Explanation:
The text explains that the ingenuity a society needs depends on “a range of factors… an easy climate or a punishing one…” among others. This clearly matches with option A, confirming that climate and other contextual elements influence the need for ingenuity.

29. D 

Location: Paragraph 4
Answer Explanation:
The paragraph mentions, “the creation of wealth… depends not only on… useful ideas but also on… traditional factors… like capital and labour.” This confirms that ingenuity alone is not sufficient and traditional resources play a vital role too. Hence, D is correct.

30. B 

Location: Paragraph 4
Answer Explanation:
The paragraph states, “prosperity, stability and justice… depend on the resolution… of major political struggles over wealth and power.” It also emphasizes the need for institutions to manage these struggles effectively. This directly aligns with B.

31. B 

Location: Paragraph 5
Answer Explanation:
The text notes that the changes of the past century “have accumulated slowly… it’s often hard for us to recognise how profound… they’ve been.” This suggests that people often fail to notice the significance of incremental changes, making B the correct option.

32. B  

Location: Paragraph 6
Answer Explanation:
The author states, “these changes have sharply increased the… pace of our interactions…” which implies that life has become faster due to these shifts. So, B is the best fit.

33. C 

Location: Paragraph 8
Answer Explanation:
The text explains, “natural systems… are often very sensitive to the smallest of changes… their behaviour can flip… dramatically.” This confirms that even small changes can have major effects, supporting C as the correct choice.

34. TRUE

Location: Paragraph 9
Answer Explanation:
The author states, “last century’s… changes… have… increased our need for ingenuity…” This shows a clear rise in the demand for ingenuity, which makes this statement TRUE.

35. TRUE

Location: Paragraph 10
Answer Explanation:
The paragraph says, “we can’t always rely on the right kind of ingenuity appearing…” meaning the ingenuity available may not always solve present problems effectively. This confirms the statement is TRUE.

36. TRUE

Location: Paragraph 10
Answer Explanation:
It is mentioned that, “Very few of us have more than a rudimentary understanding of how these systems work…” This clearly supports the idea that only a few people understand today’s complex systems, so TRUE is correct.

37. FALSE

Location: Paragraph 11
Answer Explanation:
The author states, “The crush of information… is shortening our attention span…” This contradicts the idea that more information helps decision-making. Therefore, the correct answer is FALSE.

38. NOT GIVEN

Location: Not Mentioned
Answer Explanation:
There is no reference in the passage to whether “the next generation will blame the current government for their conduct.” Since this idea is not addressed, the answer is NOT GIVEN.

39. TRUE

Location: Paragraph 12
Answer Explanation:
The text discusses how some scientific areas progress slower due to complexity: “some phenomena are intrinsically harder to understand… production of useful knowledge… can be very slow.” This implies science develops faster in some areas, so TRUE is correct.

40. FALSE

Location: Paragraph 12
Answer Explanation:
The paragraph says, “Progress in the social sciences is especially slow… but we desperately need better social scientific knowledge…” This contradicts the claim that social science is less important, hence the answer is FALSE.

Tips for Answering the Question Types in The Ingenuity Gap IELTS Reading Answers

Since now you know the answers to "The Ingenuity Gap IELTS Reading Answers", Let us check out some quick IELTS Exam Preparation Tips for Band Score of 8+ to answer the three types of questions in the Reading Answers.

Matching Information: 

Matching information is a type of IELTS reading question that requires you to match a list of information to the correct people, places, or things in a passage. To answer matching information questions, you can use the following strategies:

• Read the given information first: This will give you an idea of the types of information that you are looking for in the passage.
• Read the passage quickly: This will give you a general understanding of the content of the passage.
• Match the information to the people, places, or things: As you read the passage, look for the information that matches each feature.
• Check your answers: Once you have matched all of the features, double-check your answers to make sure that they are correct.

Multiple Choice Questions (MCQs)

IELTS Reading Multiple Choice Questions section ask you to choose the correct answer from several options based on the information in the passage. To tackle MCQs effectively, follow these strategies:

• Read the question before the options:
  Focus on what the question is asking first. This helps you understand the context before getting distracted by wrong options.
• Use the elimination method:
  Rule out clearly incorrect answers first. Narrowing down your choices increases your chances of selecting the correct one.
• Look for paraphrased ideas:
  The correct answer may not match the passage word-for-word. Instead, it may be rephrased using synonyms or similar expressions.
• Rely only on the passage:
  Do not use your own knowledge to choose an answer. Select the one that is clearly supported by the information in the text.
• Follow the order of the passage:
  The questions generally follow the sequence of the text. Once you find the first answer, look for the next one in the following paragraph or section.

True/False/Not Given

True/False/Not Given is a type of IELTS Reading question that asks you to determine whether a statement agrees with the information in the passage (True), contradicts it (False), or is not mentioned at all (Not Given). To answer these questions effectively, use the following strategies:

• Understand the meaning, not just the words:
  Do not assume a statement is True just because it contains the same words as the passage. Focus on whether the meaning of the statement matches exactly.
• Identify contradictions for False answers:
  A statement is False if the passage clearly disagrees with it. Look for direct contradictions, not just slightly different details.
• Recognize when information is missing:
  If the passage does not fully confirm or deny a statement—even if it’s related—mark it as Not Given. Avoid guessing or relying on your own knowledge.
• Skim and scan strategically:
  First, skim the passage to get a general idea. Then scan it using keywords from the question to locate the relevant section quickly.
• Pay attention to absolute qualifiers:
  Words like always, never, only, and all often indicate a trap. If the passage doesn’t mention such extremes, the answer may be False or Not Given.

Mastering passages like "The Ingenuity Gap IELTS Reading Answers” can significantly boost your Reading IELTS band score. Regular practice with real exam-style questions not only improves speed and accuracy but also builds your confidence. Keep exploring different IELTS Reading passages and refine your techniques to ensure success on test day.

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