Athletes and stress: reading answers and analysis
Starting from Emma Raducanu's Wimbledon withdrawal, the passage explains stress as demands weighed against resources. Feeling well-resourced gives a 'challenge state' and better play, while feeling overloaded gives a 'threat state', with cortisol blunting adrenaline. It closes with ways to steer athletes toward the positive response.
Questions 14-26 · 13 marks · 4 question blocks
Where the answers sit
Paragraph matching (14-18) uses F twice. The sentence completions (19-22) run in order through B, D and F. Questions 23-24 are about paragraphs A and C, and 25-26 are confined to E, as the question says.
Questions 14-18
F is the answer twice: it holds both the strategies and the people (coaches, parents, psychologists) who shape how athletes read their own reactions. The 'two chemical compounds' are adrenaline and cortisol in D. The research results linking stress responses to performance are in C, not D.
| Question | Answer | Also accepted |
|---|---|---|
| 14 | D | — |
| 15 | F | — |
| 16 | A | — |
| 17 | C | — |
| 18 | F | — |
Questions 19-22
Each sentence points to one paragraph: the demands list in B, the tennis detail at the end of D, and the psychologist and technique examples in F. Question 22 needs a capital letter only because it starts the sentence. Both spellings of visualisation are accepted.
| Question | Answer | Also accepted |
|---|---|---|
| 19 | injury | — |
| 20 | serves | — |
| 21 | excitement | — |
| 22 | Visualisation | Visualization / visualisation / visualization |
Questions 23-24
A gives her symptoms (breathing, heart rate), and C lists what made Wimbledon more demanding (bigger crowd, higher expectations, a stronger opponent). The passage never says what round she left in, what she did to manage stress, or how people reacted to her post.
| Question | Answer | Also accepted |
|---|---|---|
| 23-24 | B and D(in either order) | — |
Questions 25-26
Stay inside paragraph E. It says intensity depends on demands and resources, and that repeated episodes raise the risk of heart disease and depression. It lists many symptoms but never ranks them, so 'most common symptom' is a trap.
| Question | Answer | Also accepted |
|---|---|---|
| 25-26 | A and E(in either order) | — |
The questions most people get wrong
C, not D. D describes what the hormones do in the body. The line 'research shows challenge states lead to good performance' is in C.
Option A tempts because the passage says she was doing well in the tournament, but it never says at what stage she withdrew.
The answer is 'excitement', the feeling psychologists relabel a racing heart as. 'Nerves' is the word they steer athletes away from.
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The full Cambridge 19 Test 2 reading paper: all three passages, 60 minutes, marked the second you finish with a review of every answer. Already done it? Take it again and see if the same traps still get you.
Cambridge IELTS 19, Test 2, Reading Passage 2. The passage name belongs to Cambridge University Press. No passage text or question wording is reproduced on this page. The answers are published for self-marking, and the analysis is our own.