A2–C2 · PTE Academic
PTE Academic Practice Test 27
AI-generated practice paper in the style of PTE Academic — original material, not a reproduction of any real exam paper, following the official task types. Listening audio is read aloud by your browser's voice. For Speaking you can record yourself and compare with a model answer, and Writing tasks include a model answer — neither is scored automatically, since that needs real speech and writing evaluation this site does not offer for this exam.
Speaking
Read Aloud
Look at the text below. In 30 seconds, you must read this text aloud as naturally and clearly as possible.
In 1928, Alexander Fleming noticed that a mould growing on one of his laboratory dishes had killed the surrounding bacteria. This chance observation led to the discovery of penicillin, which went on to save millions of lives during and after the Second World War.
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Model answer: Say the year as "nineteen twenty-eight". Pause after "dishes" and after "penicillin". Stress "chance observation" and "millions of lives". Pronounce "penicillin" and "laboratory" carefully and give "Second World War" a clear fall.
Time management is a skill that can be learned. Successful students often begin by listing their tasks, ranking them by urgency and setting aside fixed periods for concentrated study. Avoiding distractions such as social media during those periods makes the work both faster and more enjoyable.
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Model answer: Stress "can be learned". Pause after "tasks" and "urgency". Read the three actions as a parallel list. Say "concentrated" and "distractions" clearly, and end with a positive falling tone on "enjoyable".
Repeat Sentence
You will hear a sentence. Please repeat the sentence exactly as you hear it.
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Model answer: The theatre company performs in schools and community centres across the region.
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Model answer: Historians often rely on letters and diaries to understand daily life in the past.
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Model answer: Cultural differences can sometimes lead to misunderstandings in the workplace.
Describe Image
Describe the image in detail.
Look at the image below. In 25 seconds, prepare, then describe in detail what the image is showing. You will have 40 seconds to speak.
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Model answer: The chart compares the percentage of students who passed their final exams in six subjects. Art has the highest pass rate at 92 percent, while chemistry has the lowest at 66 percent. English and history are both above 80 percent, at 85 and 81 percent, whereas mathematics reaches 72 percent. In general, creative and language-based subjects seem easier for students to pass than the sciences.
Re-tell Lecture
Listen to the lecture and retell it.
Listen to the lecture. Then retell it in your own words. You will have 40 seconds to speak.
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Model answer: The lecture notes that while Bell patented the telephone in eighteen seventy-six, rival Elisha Gray filed a similar claim the same day, leading to years of legal dispute. Bell's key innovation was transmitting speech as continuous electrical signal, unlike telegraph dots and dashes. Widespread home use only followed decades later, after automatic switching replaced manual operators.
Answer Short Question
You will hear a question. Type your answer in one or a few words.
1. Type what you hear.
2. Type what you hear.
3. Type what you hear.
4. Type what you hear.
Summarize Group Discussion
Listen to a group discussion and summarise it.
Listen to the discussion. Then summarise it, covering each speaker's main point. You will have 70 seconds to speak.
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Model answer: Grace supports a global minimum corporate tax to stop profit shifting to tax havens. Henry doubts universal agreement is politically realistic. Isla argues a large coalition could still apply meaningful pressure. They agree the idea is sound but needs real enforcement mechanisms, such as coordinated tariffs, to prevent holdout countries from undermining the agreement.
Respond to a Situation
Listen to the situation and respond as if you were in it.
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Model answer: I don't want this to feel awkward between us, but I need to bring up the money I lent you three months ago. I know you mentioned repaying it within a month, and I completely understand if things came up, but I genuinely need it back now. Could we agree on a specific date that works for you?
Writing
Summarize Written Text
Read the passage and write a one-sentence summary.
Antibiotics transformed medicine in the twentieth century, turning once-lethal infections into routine problems. Their success, however, contains the seeds of their own decline. Whenever an antibiotic is used, most bacteria in the patient's body are killed, but a few may carry genetic mutations that allow them to survive. These survivors multiply, and because bacteria reproduce within hours, resistant strains can quickly dominate. Bacteria can also exchange resistance genes directly, even between different species, which accelerates the spread. Although this evolutionary process is natural, human behaviour has intensified it. Doctors sometimes prescribe antibiotics for viral illnesses such as colds, against which they are useless; patients stop courses early, leaving the hardiest bacteria alive; and in many countries the drugs are sold without prescription. Agriculture contributes as well, since large quantities are given to livestock to promote growth or prevent disease in crowded conditions. The outcome is a growing number of infections that no longer respond to standard treatment. Meanwhile, the development of new antibiotics has slowed, because they are less profitable for pharmaceutical companies than drugs taken daily for chronic conditions. Health authorities therefore advocate a two-part response: more careful use of existing drugs, supported by rapid diagnostic tests, and new financial incentives to encourage the discovery of replacements before routine surgery again becomes dangerous.
Read the passage and summarise it in ONE sentence of no more than 75 words.
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Model answer: Overuse and misuse of antibiotics in medicine and farming have allowed resistant bacteria to spread while few new drugs are being developed, so health authorities call for more careful prescribing and financial incentives to encourage the discovery of replacements.
Write Essay
Write an essay of about 200-300 words on the topic.
Artificial intelligence tools that can write essays and answer questions are now widely available to students. Should schools and universities ban their use, or teach students to use them responsibly?
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Model answer: The arrival of powerful AI writing tools has left educators uncertain about how to respond. Some want to ban them altogether, but I believe that teaching responsible use is the more realistic and beneficial course.
Those in favour of a ban have understandable concerns. If a program can produce a passable essay in seconds, students may submit work that is not their own and fail to develop the skills that assignments are designed to build, such as constructing an argument and expressing ideas clearly. Assessment based on take-home writing could lose its value.
However, a prohibition would be almost impossible to enforce. Detection software is unreliable and sometimes accuses innocent students, and pupils will encounter these tools outside school in any case. More importantly, they will use similar technology in their future workplaces, so leaving them unprepared would be a disservice. Used sensibly, AI can explain difficult concepts, suggest improvements to a draft, and help students who are learning a language.
Schools should therefore set clear rules on what is acceptable, require students to acknowledge when they have used AI, and adapt assessment methods, for example by including more oral examinations, in-class writing and work that shows the process behind a final product. They should also teach students to check machine-generated content, which is often inaccurate. In this way, AI becomes an aid to learning rather than a substitute for it.
Reading
Reading & Writing: Fill in the Blanks
Select the best word for each blank.
Although roughly seventy percent of the planet's surface is covered by water, only a small fraction of it is drinking, irrigation or industrial use. Freshwater is distributed unevenly across the globe, and rapid population growth in certain regions has placed pressure on rivers, lakes and underground aquifers. Agriculture consumes the largest share of freshwater withdrawals worldwide, since crops must be irrigated seasonal rainfall to guarantee a reliable harvest. Climate change is expected to worsen the situation further, as shifting rainfall patterns make some regions considerably drier while others experience more frequent flooding. Engineers and policymakers are therefore exploring solutions ranging from desalination plants to stricter regulation of water in agriculture and industry.
Multiple Choice, Choose Multiple Answers
Read the text and select all the correct answers.
Modern maize, also known as corn, looks so different from its closest wild relative, a grass called teosinte, that early researchers struggled for decades to accept that the two were closely related at all. Teosinte produces only a handful of small, hard kernels enclosed in a tough casing, arranged along a thin, branching stalk quite unlike the single thick cob familiar from a modern cornfield. Genetic studies eventually confirmed that ancient farmers in Mesoamerica, beginning several thousand years ago, gradually transformed teosinte into modern maize through repeated selective planting, favouring plants with larger, softer kernels that were easier to harvest and consume, changes that required altering the activity of only a relatively small number of genes despite the dramatic difference in appearance. Because this transformation occurred well before written records, researchers have relied heavily on genetic analysis of ancient and modern samples, combined with archaeological evidence from preserved plant remains, to reconstruct the timeline and specific stages of maize domestication in unusual detail compared with many other domesticated crops. As maize cultivation later spread far beyond its original homeland, it became a staple food across much of the Americas and eventually much of the world, valued for its high yield and adaptability to a wide range of growing conditions.
1. According to the passage, which TWO of the following are true?
Re-order Paragraphs
Click the sentences to put them in the correct order.
2. Put the paragraph in the correct order.
Reading: Fill in the Blanks
Choose the best word for each blank.
Cloud computing allows businesses to computing power and data storage from a specialised provider over the internet, rather than purchasing and maintaining their own physical servers on site. This arrangement allows a company to its available computing resources up or down quickly in response to changing demand, avoiding the substantial upfront cost of buying enough hardware to handle occasional peak usage that might otherwise sit unused most of the time. Because cloud providers operate enormous data centres serving many customers simultaneously, they can typically achieve efficiencies of scale that would be difficult for an individual company to on its own with a much smaller, dedicated set of servers. Critics note that relying heavily on a single cloud provider can create a degree of dependency, since migrating a large, complex system to a different provider later can prove costly and technically difficult to . For this reason, some companies deliberately spread critical systems across multiple providers specifically to this risk of dependency on any single company.
Multiple Choice, Choose Single Answer
Read the text and choose the best answer.
Marketers and social commentators frequently divide the population into named generational categories, such as baby boomers or millennials, based primarily on a person's approximate birth year, and then attribute broad, shared characteristics, values or consumer preferences to everyone born within that particular range of years. Critics of this widespread practice argue that these generational labels, while convenient and commercially appealing for marketing purposes, considerably oversimplify the genuine diversity of experience and outlook that actually exists among the many millions of people grouped together under a single generational label, since factors such as socioeconomic background, geographic location and individual life experience typically influence a person's actual values and preferences far more than birth year alone. Some researchers have also questioned exactly where the precise boundaries between one named generation and the next should genuinely be drawn, noting that different organisations and commentators frequently define the specific birth-year ranges for supposedly the same generation quite differently from one another. Despite these substantial methodological and definitional criticisms, generational labels remain extremely popular in media coverage and marketing campaigns, largely because a simple, memorable generational label offers a convenient narrative shorthand that resonates easily with a broad general audience, even where the label's genuine scientific validity remains seriously questionable.
3. According to the passage, what is one criticism researchers make of generational labels?
Listening
Summarize Spoken Text
Listen to the recording, then write a summary.
Transcript (available after checking)
It's easy to forget that people once lived without minute-by-minute schedules. In medieval villages, days were organised by sunrise, sunset and church bells, and work followed the seasons. The Industrial Revolution changed that. Factories needed hundreds of workers to start and stop together, so employers introduced time clocks, fines for lateness, and whistles or bells. The historian E. P. Thompson argued that this new discipline taught people to see time as a resource, something to be spent, saved or wasted. Railways reinforced the trend. Every town used its own local time, which caused chaos for timetables, so in the eighteen eighties, standard time zones were adopted. The result was a society in which punctuality became a virtue. Many of our current habits, including our stress about deadlines, can be traced back to this era.
Write a summary of the lecture in 50–70 words.
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Model answer: Before industrialisation, work followed daylight and seasons, but factories required workers to start and stop together, introducing clocks, fines for lateness and a view of time as a resource. Railways then forced standard time zones, making punctuality a virtue and shaping modern attitudes toward schedules, deadlines and the feeling that time is always running out.
Multiple Choice, Choose Multiple Answers
Listen and select all the correct answers.
Transcript (available after checking)
Does the language you speak affect how you see colour? Some languages, such as Russian, have separate basic words for light blue and dark blue, whereas English uses one word, blue, for both. In experiments, Russian speakers were slightly faster at telling apart two shades of blue that fell on either side of that boundary. English speakers showed no such advantage. Researchers interpret this as evidence that language can influence perception, though only in small and subtle ways. It doesn't mean speakers of different languages live in different visual worlds. The physical structure of the human eye is the same for everyone, and people can always learn new colour distinctions. Interestingly, the advantage disappeared when Russian speakers were asked to repeat a string of numbers while doing the task, which suggests that inner speech was helping them.
1. Which TWO statements match the lecture?
Fill in the Blanks
Listen to the recording and type the missing words.
Sound travels as vibrations passing through air or solid materials, so effective soundproofing works by absorbing those vibrations or interrupting the path they travel . Soft, porous materials such as thick fabric absorb sound energy well because their irregular structure converts vibration into small amounts of , whereas hard, flat surfaces tend to reflect sound, which is why an empty room often sounds unpleasantly . For blocking sound between rooms entirely, mass and separation matter most; a heavy wall, or two walls with an air gap between , blocks far more sound than a single lightweight .
Highlight Correct Summary
Listen and choose the paragraph that best summarises the recording.
Transcript (available after checking)
Simple lifting devices existed for centuries, but they remained impractical for tall buildings until a safety problem was solved: the fear that a lift's supporting rope or cable might snap, sending the cabin plunging to the ground. In eighteen fifty-two, an American inventor publicly demonstrated a safety brake that would automatically engage and stop the cabin's fall the instant the cable broke, dramatically reducing the risk and, crucially, public fear of using lifts. This single innovation made tall buildings genuinely practical for the first time, since previously the upper floors of any building were the least desirable, reachable only by climbing many flights of stairs; once safe elevators existed, upper floors could instead command higher prices for their views, and skyscrapers gradually became commercially viable as a result.
2. Which paragraph best summarises the recording?
Multiple Choice, Choose Single Answer
Listen and choose the best answer.
Transcript (available after checking)
Before dedicated pedestrian crossings existed, crossing a busy street safely depended entirely on a pedestrian's own judgement of approaching traffic, which grew increasingly dangerous as car ownership and traffic volumes rose through the early twentieth century. The striped black-and-white crossing, later nicknamed after a popular musical group because of an iconic photograph taken on one, was introduced in Britain in the nineteen fifties after trials of several designs, including coloured studs set into the road, which proved less visible to drivers than the eventual striped pattern. Crossings were later supplemented with pedestrian-activated traffic lights, further reducing collisions.
3. Why was the striped design eventually chosen over the studded design, according to the lecture?
Select Missing Word
The recording ends with a beep. Choose the option that best completes it.
4. Choose the word or phrase that best completes the recording.
Highlight Incorrect Words
Listen to the recording and select the words in the text that differ from what you hear.
5. The text below differs from the recording in some words. Select the words that are DIFFERENT from what you hear. Early electric lighting had no dedicated switch at all; users often had to physically link or disconnect a wire, which was distinctly inconvenient and mildly risky. An inventor patented the familiar quick-break toggle switch in the eighteen eighties, using a spring mechanism that forced the electrical contacts apart rapidly enough to prevent the small arcing that had damaged slower switch designs.
Write from Dictation
Listen to the sentence and type it exactly as you hear it.
6. Type what you hear.
7. Type what you hear.
Keep your streak going
Up next: PTE Academic Practice Test 28