👩‍🏫 For Teachers:

Use this 15-minute lesson to build reading accuracy with authentic B1 IELTS question types.
Guide students through the passage and verify answers using the step-by-step text evidence keys provided below.

🎓 For Learners:

First, read Paragraphs A to D carefully to understand the main ideas of the article.
Next, answer the 8 questions in order, checking the text details to avoid getting caught by matching words.

Mosaics Through Time

[A] Long ago, Romans decorated their floors with mosaics made from tiny stone cubes called tesserae. Makers usually used stone from the area near them. National Museum Wales says that workers probably sawed the stone into sticks and then chipped each piece with a hammer and a chisel.

[B] The main colours of the stone pieces were blue or black, red, white and yellow. A museum in North Carolina says that tesserae can also be made of glass or tile, and that Roman artists had a technique that made mosaics look more like paintings.

[C] In Ravenna, in Italy, eight early Christian buildings from the fifth and sixth centuries are on the UNESCO World Heritage List. UNESCO added them in 1996. All but one of the buildings have mosaics inside.

[D] The late Roman mosaic from Hinton St Mary, a village in Dorset, was found in 1963. Its central circle may show Christ. In 2023, a page by Albion Archaeology said that only that central circle was on show at the British Museum in London.

Craftsmen shaped individual stone cubes called tesserae to build complex floor mosaics.