A2–C2 · PTE Academic
PTE Academic Practice Test 31
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.
Insulation is one of the most effective ways to reduce household energy use. By trapping heat inside during winter and keeping it out during summer, well-insulated homes require far less heating and cooling. The initial cost is usually recovered within a few years through lower bills.
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Model answer: Pronounce "insulation" and "initial" clearly. Pause after "use" and after "summer". Contrast "inside during winter" with "out during summer". Stress "far less" and "lower bills", ending on a firm falling tone.
Bilingual children often switch between languages within a single conversation. Linguists once regarded this habit as a sign of confusion, but recent research suggests the opposite: switching demands considerable mental control and may strengthen attention and problem-solving skills later in life.
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Model answer: Pause after "conversation" and after the colon-like break at "opposite". Stress "once regarded" then "recent research" to mark the change of view. Enunciate "considerable" (four syllables) and keep "attention and problem-solving skills" as one flowing group. Drop your voice on "later in life".
Repeat Sentence
You will hear a sentence. Please repeat the sentence exactly as you hear it.
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Model answer: Our results confirm what earlier researchers had suspected.
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Model answer: The old railway bridge has been turned into a pedestrian walkway.
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Model answer: The essay compares two different approaches to teaching mathematics.
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: This chart shows average home internet speeds in seven countries. Singapore is fastest at 260 megabits per second, with Hong Kong close behind at 240 and Switzerland at 190. Spain reaches 175, but then the figures fall sharply: the United Kingdom manages 80, Australia 64 and Brazil only 55. The fastest country is therefore nearly five times quicker than the slowest.
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 introduces nudge theory, where small changes in how choices are presented, like making pension saving the default, steer people toward better outcomes while keeping choice free. Examples include cafeteria food placement and energy-use comparisons. The lecturer notes critics fear manipulation, so nudges should stay transparent and reversible.
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: Isla argues excessive homework harms sleep and family time without clear learning benefit. Jack distinguishes useful skill-practice homework from low-value busywork. Anna raises equity concerns, since home conditions affect who benefits from homework. They agree on minimal, purposeful, skill-focused homework with support for disadvantaged students, rather than eliminating or maximizing homework outright.
Respond to a Situation
Listen to the situation and respond as if you were in it.
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Model answer: I've sent three written requests over the past month about the leaking pipe under the kitchen sink, and the water damage is now spreading into the cabinet below. I need this repaired within the next few days, or I'll need to arrange a plumber myself and deduct the cost from next month's rent, as permitted under our tenancy agreement.
Writing
Summarize Written Text
Read the passage and write a one-sentence summary.
In the 1630s, the price of tulip bulbs in the Dutch Republic rose to extraordinary levels. Rare varieties with striking streaked petals, which we now know were caused by a virus, sold for more than the cost of a canal house in Amsterdam. Popular accounts, especially a nineteenth-century book by Charles Mackay, describe a nation-wide frenzy in which people from every social class mortgaged property to speculate on bulbs, followed by a sudden collapse that ruined thousands. Tulip mania has since become a standard warning about the irrational behaviour of markets. Modern historians, however, question much of this story. Surviving records suggest that trading was concentrated among a relatively small number of wealthy merchants and enthusiasts, and that few people went bankrupt as a result of the crash. Many contracts were for future delivery and were never enforced, and when prices fell, courts and municipal authorities often allowed buyers to settle by paying a small fraction of the agreed sum. Some economists further argue that the high prices may have reflected genuine excitement about a novel luxury product, not pure delusion. If the traditional version exaggerates, its persistence is nonetheless revealing: the story has endured because it offers a simple moral about greed, and people are often more interested in a memorable parable than in the less dramatic truth.
Read the passage and summarise it in ONE sentence of no more than 75 words.
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Model answer: Although the seventeenth-century Dutch tulip mania is traditionally cited as an example of mass financial madness, modern historians argue that it involved few people and caused little ruin, so the story survives chiefly because it provides a compelling moral lesson about greed.
Write Essay
Write an essay of about 200-300 words on the topic.
Video consultations with doctors, known as telemedicine, have become increasingly common. Should telemedicine replace most in-person medical appointments?
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Model answer: Telemedicine expanded rapidly during recent years, and while I believe it offers genuine advantages, I do not think it should replace most in-person medical appointments.
Video consultations are clearly useful in many situations. They save patients time and travel, particularly in rural areas with few local doctors, and they make it easier to arrange quick follow-up appointments or renew routine prescriptions without taking time off work. For mental health support, some patients even find it easier to speak openly from the comfort of their own home rather than a clinical setting. Doctors can also use the time saved on straightforward cases to focus on patients who need more complex care.
Nevertheless, many aspects of medicine depend on physical examination that a screen cannot replicate. A doctor cannot listen to a patient's heart, check for swelling, or examine a wound remotely, and subtle physical signs that an experienced clinician would notice in person may be missed on a video call. Certain patients, particularly older people or those unfamiliar with technology, may also struggle to use video consultation services effectively, risking a new form of inequality in access to care.
I therefore believe telemedicine is best used to complement, rather than replace, traditional appointments: suitable for simple, low-risk consultations and follow-ups, but not for new or serious symptoms, physical examinations, or patients who cannot use the technology confidently. A flexible system offering both options seems far preferable to relying on either method alone.
Reading
Reading & Writing: Fill in the Blanks
Select the best word for each blank.
Long before modern vaccines were developed, some societies practised a rudimentary form of immunisation known as variolation, in which material taken from a mild smallpox sore was into a healthy person, usually through a small cut in the skin. Although the practice carried real risks and occasionally caused serious illness, it generally produced a far milder infection than catching smallpox naturally, and it lasting protection on survivors. In the late eighteenth century, the physician Edward Jenner observed that milkmaids who had previously caught a much milder disease called cowpox seemed to be to smallpox as well. Building on this observation, he deliberately infected a patient with cowpox and later showed that the same person resisted exposure smallpox itself. Jenner's method, safer than variolation, laid the foundation for the vaccination programmes that eventually smallpox worldwide by the late twentieth century.
Multiple Choice, Choose Multiple Answers
Read the text and select all the correct answers.
The feudal system that structured much of medieval European society was built around an exchange of land for loyalty and military service. A king would grant large estates to powerful nobles in return for their pledge to supply soldiers when needed, and these nobles, in turn, distributed portions of their land to lesser lords under similar obligations. At the base of this hierarchy laboured peasants, many of them serfs bound to a particular estate, who worked the land and surrendered a share of their harvest to the lord in exchange for protection and the right to remain on that land. This arrangement provided a degree of order and defence in an age when centralised royal authority was often weak and outside invasion a constant threat, but it also concentrated enormous power in the hands of local lords, who could exercise near-total control over the peasants living on their land. The system began to weaken gradually from the fourteenth century onward, as devastating outbreaks of plague sharply reduced the available workforce, giving surviving peasants unprecedented bargaining power to demand wages or better terms rather than unpaid labour bound to a single estate.
1. Which TWO statements accurately reflect the passage?
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.
A hydrogen fuel cell generates electricity through a chemical reaction that combines hydrogen gas with oxygen from the surrounding air, producing electrical power along with water as the only significant by-product, a process that many engineers view as an unusually clean way to power for vehicles compared with burning fossil fuels directly. Vehicles powered by fuel cells can typically be refuelled with hydrogen gas in only a few minutes, considerably faster than the time currently required to fully recharge many battery-electric vehicles, though hydrogen fuelling stations remain far less widespread than either conventional petrol stations or battery-charging points. Producing hydrogen fuel in a genuinely low-carbon way, however, currently a significant amount of electricity, meaning the overall environmental benefit of a hydrogen vehicle depends heavily on how that electricity used to produce the hydrogen was itself generated in the first place. Engineers and policymakers continue to debate whether hydrogen fuel cells or battery-electric technology will ultimately prove more practical for widespread everyday transport, and some now expect the two competing technologies to eventually , each best suited to somewhat different specific transport applications.
Multiple Choice, Choose Single Answer
Read the text and choose the best answer.
Gothic literature, a genre that emerged in the late eighteenth century and remained enormously popular throughout much of the nineteenth, characteristically combines elements of horror, mystery and the supernatural, frequently set against a atmospheric backdrop of crumbling castles, isolated country houses or similarly foreboding architectural settings. Central to much gothic fiction is a persistent, unsettling tension between the seemingly rational, orderly modern world and unexplained, often deeply irrational forces, whether genuinely supernatural or instead ultimately psychological, that threaten to disrupt or entirely overwhelm a story's central characters. Gothic novels frequently explore deep anxieties surrounding hidden family secrets, inherited guilt or unresolved trauma, often symbolically represented through a decaying ancestral estate or house that seems to embody and physically manifest a family's own troubled, unresolved past. Literary historians frequently trace the enduring influence of gothic literary conventions directly through into many later literary and cinematic genres, including modern horror fiction and psychological thriller writing, arguing that the core gothic tension between rational explanation and unsettling, unexplained irrational forces continues to resonate powerfully with readers and audiences across the many decades since the genre's original eighteenth-century emergence.
3. According to the passage, what central tension is often explored in gothic literature?
Listening
Summarize Spoken Text
Listen to the recording, then write a summary.
Transcript (available after checking)
Most people think of sleep as a switch that turns the brain off, but neuroscientists now see it as a very busy period. During the deepest stages of sleep, the brain replays the day's experiences, moving new information from the hippocampus, which stores things temporarily, to the cortex, where memories are kept for the long term. Later, during dreaming sleep, the brain seems to connect those new memories with older ones, which may explain why a difficult problem often looks easier in the morning. In one well-known experiment, students who slept after learning a list of words remembered far more than students who stayed awake for the same length of time. So the advice is clear. Pulling an all-night study session before an exam is usually counterproductive, because you lose the very process that fixes what you've learned.
Write a summary of the lecture in 50–70 words.
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Model answer: Sleep is an active period in which the brain replays daily experiences and transfers new information from temporary to long-term storage, later linking it with older memories. Experiments show that students who sleep after studying remember more, so staying up all night before an exam is counterproductive because it interrupts memory consolidation.
Multiple Choice, Choose Multiple Answers
Listen and select all the correct answers.
Transcript (available after checking)
Paper is traditionally credited to a Chinese court official named Cai Lun, who around the year one hundred and five combined mulberry bark, hemp waste, old rags and fishing nets, mashed them into a pulp, and pressed thin sheets that dried into a lightweight writing surface. Before this, texts were written on heavy bamboo strips or expensive silk, so paper was transformative: cheaper, lighter and easier to produce in quantity. The technique spread slowly along trade routes, reaching Korea and Japan within a few centuries, but it took far longer to reach Europe, arriving only after paper-making knowledge passed through the Islamic world following a battle in the eighth century where paper makers were reportedly captured. European papermaking wasn't established until several centuries after that. For nearly a thousand years, paper remained one of China's most significant technological exports.
1. Which THREE facts about papermaking are given in the lecture?
Fill in the Blanks
Listen to the recording and type the missing words.
Salt marshes, the flat, grassy wetlands along many temperate coastlines, do far more than provide bird habitat; they also buffer coastal flooding and storm . The dense roots of marsh plants trap sediment and slow incoming waves, absorbing energy that would otherwise strike sea walls or further inland. As sea levels , healthy marshes can build upward by trapping more sediment, provided they have room to migrate landward and aren't blocked by . Coastal engineers increasingly favour restoring marshes as a cheaper, self-maintaining alternative to costly concrete flood .
Highlight Correct Summary
Listen and choose the paragraph that best summarises the recording.
Transcript (available after checking)
Wave energy converters aim to capture the up-and-down and side-to-side motion of ocean waves and turn it into electricity, using designs that range from floating buoys that bob with passing waves to hinged structures anchored to the seabed that flex back and forth as waves pass over them. Compared with wind, waves are a denser source of energy for their size, since water is far heavier than air, meaning wave devices can potentially generate significant power from a relatively compact structure. However, the technology has struggled to reach the same commercial maturity as wind or solar, partly because ocean environments are extremely harsh on mechanical equipment, with saltwater corrosion and storm damage causing frequent breakdowns, and partly because many competing designs have been tested without one clearly winning out as the most reliable and cost-effective approach.
2. Which paragraph best summarises the recording?
Multiple Choice, Choose Single Answer
Listen and choose the best answer.
Transcript (available after checking)
Beavers are considered a keystone species because the dams they build across streams dramatically reshape the surrounding landscape, benefiting many other species. By blocking a stream's flow, a dam creates a pond and slows the water, letting sediment and nutrients settle rather than washing downstream, gradually creating fertile wetland habitat that attracts fish, amphibians and waterfowl that couldn't survive in the faster stream before. Beaver ponds also help during droughts by storing water that would otherwise drain away, and some regions now deliberately reintroduce beavers to restore degraded wetlands cheaply.
3. Why are beavers described as a keystone species, 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. An octopus has three hearts: two pump blood through the gills, and one also circulates it around the rest of the body. Their blood looks blue rather than red because it uses a copper-based molecule to carry oxygen instead of the iron-based molecule found in most vertebrate blood. That main heart actually pauses beating when the octopus swims, which is partly why they choose crawling over swimming, especially over long distances.
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 32