The Story of the Battery – IELTS Reading Answers

With the passage on ‘The Story of the Battery’, your ability to find information will be improved which will give you an opportunity to track your progress. As you dive into this passage, you can comprehend difficult concepts with ease, attempt questions with specific strategy and improve your reading speed. Since there is a time limit in the IELTS Reading section, regular practice under exam conditions can help you in providing accurate answers. 

Types of Questions in ‘The Story of the Battery’

The ability to recognize different question types is important as you can quickly create a mental map on which strategy to follow for each question. With this approach, you can handle different question types as you gain the confidence. Let’s check out the question types for the passage on ‘The Story of the Battery’.

• IELTS Reading Table Completion [Q.1-Q.5]
• IELTS Reading Sentence Completion [Q.6-Q.7]

IELTS Reading Passage on ‘The Story of the Battery’

The Story of the Battery

When people consider today how indispensable the Internet is, they often overlook that without electricity, it would not function. Living without the Internet would be a significant inconvenience today, but without electricity, life as we know now would collapse. Since we started using electricity, which was in the middle of the nineteenth century, we have worked on ways to move and store it easily and efficiently and one of the most common ways of storing electricity has been the battery. A battery does not actually store electricity. A battery, which is actually an electric cell, is a device that produces electricity from a chemical reaction. The story of the battery is one of people trying to create different compounds to create an electric current. The two goals on improving batteries have always been to create ones that can produce an electric current for a long time and to make them smaller and smaller.

Alessandro Volta is credited with creating in 1800 the first battery and the first practical method of generating electricity. Luigi Galvani, another Italian scientist and contemporary of Volta, almost made the discovery, but misinterpreted his research results. Using a frog’s leg in an experiment, Galvani concluded that the electric current was ‘animal electricity’ and did not come from the apparatus he had set up. Volta’s battery was made by piling up layers of silver and paper or cloth, soaked in salt, and zinc. These layers were assembled, without paper or cloth between the zinc and silver, until the current was created.

Volta’s battery was not good for delivering currents for any significant duration. This restriction was overcome in the Daniell Cell in 1820. Using different chemicals, John Daniell used a copper pot, copper sulphate, sulphuric acid and mercury to produce his electric current. Although we now know better than to put mercury into batteries, this battery, which produced about 1.1 volts, was used to power telegraphs, telephones, and even to ring doorbells in homes for over 100 years. Although many other chemical combinations were used in batteries over the years, the lead acid battery is one that stands out. First made in 1859, it was further improved in 1881 and this design even now forms the basis of the modern lead acid battery found in cars.

One very common battery used today is the lithium-ion battery, which was developed by the United States’ Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) as a part of their efforts during the Cold War. The idea surrounding the lithium-ion battery was to create a power source that could provide a long duration, high-density energy supply in a small package. In the early 1960’s, both the private and public sectors were experimenting with creating batteries using lithium, but the breakthrough in the chemistry was achieved by adding the ion into the equation. Not long after its invention, the CIA shared the lithium-ion battery concept with the public and a company working on an exploratory project developed and created the first patent for the lithium-ion battery for commercial use in 1968. Used for a variety of different applications, the first lithium-ion battery was a game-changer in the medical industry, where it is used as the power source in heart pacemakers.

Questions 1 – 5 

Questions 6 – 7 

6 The lithium-ion battery was invented as part of the United States’ contribution to the _______________.

7 The _______________ that allowed the success of the lithium-ion battery was the chemical addition of the ion to the equation.

Answer with Explanation for ‘The Story of the Battery’

Preparation for the Reading module requires a complete analysis of correct answers for the passage on ‘The Story of the Battery’. Your understanding will be improved when you critically analyse the reasons for each answer which will help you reach your desired  IELTS Band Score. The table below shows the answers along with their locations in the passage and explanations to help you understand effective strategies.

As you practice, your keyword identification skills and paraphrasing comprehension abilities will improve which will help you to elevate your answer retrieval skills. Since time management skills are crucial, take every practice test as an opportunity to improve your reading approach. By incorporating a disciplined study method, both your speed and accuracy will improve along with your confidence which will boost your band scores.

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