A2–C2 · PTE Academic
PTE Academic Practice Test 33
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.
The printing press, introduced to Europe in the fifteenth century, transformed the way information travelled. Books that once took monks months to copy could now be produced in days. Literacy spread, prices fell, and new ideas crossed borders faster than ever before, laying the foundations for both the Reformation and the scientific revolution.
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Model answer: Keep an even pace and pause at each comma. Stress the contrast between "months" and "days". Pronounce "fifteenth" clearly with both final consonants. The final phrase is long, so take a breath after "borders" and lift your energy on "Reformation" and "scientific revolution" before a falling tone on the last word.
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 clinic offers free health checks to all new students.
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Model answer: The city council plans to build a cycle path along the river.
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Model answer: The results of the survey were published in a national newspaper.
Describe Image
Describe the image in detail.
Bus — 38%
Walking — 24%
Car — 18%
Bicycle — 12%
Train — 8%
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 pie chart shows the ways students get to college. The bus is the most common choice, used by 38 percent. Walking is second at 24 percent and car third at 18. Twelve percent cycle and only 8 percent take the train. Together, the bus and walking account for 62 percent, so most students rely on cheap, local transport rather than private cars.
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 argues that social media actively reshapes social dynamics through follower counts, algorithms favoring engagement over accuracy, and constant comparison. Influencer marketing exploits parasocial relationships, one-sided feelings of closeness that make endorsements feel like friendly advice. The lecturer highlights particular concern for younger users still forming their identity and self-worth.
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 favors a cashless society for its convenience and reduced robbery risk. Henry warns this disadvantages elderly people and those without bank access or reliable internet. Isla raises privacy concerns about digital transaction records enabling surveillance. They agree on keeping cash available alongside digital payments, combined with stronger data protection laws, rather than eliminating cash entirely.
Respond to a Situation
Listen to the situation and respond as if you were in it.
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Model answer: I understand this looks unusual on your end, but here's my confirmed booking with a clear reference number from the app I purchased it through. This seems to be a technical issue between the app and your system rather than an invalid ticket. Could you note the reference number and let me continue, while I contact the app's support to resolve this.
Writing
Summarize Written Text
Read the passage and write a one-sentence summary.
Households in many countries diligently sort their waste, believing that the plastic bottles and containers they place in recycling bins will be turned into new products. The reality is less encouraging. Globally, only about nine percent of all plastic ever produced has been recycled, while most has been buried, burned or allowed to escape into the environment. There are several reasons. Plastic is not a single material but hundreds of varieties, and mixing different types produces low-quality material, so recyclers require careful sorting, which is expensive. Every time plastic is reprocessed, its polymer chains shorten and the material weakens, so it can seldom be recycled more than a few times. Food residue and labels further contaminate the batches. Above all, the economics are unfavourable: when oil is cheap, new plastic costs less than recycled resin, giving manufacturers little reason to use it. For years, wealthy countries relied on exporting their plastic waste to Asia, but after China banned imports in 2018, the fragility of this arrangement was exposed, and shipments were redirected to other countries that often lacked the facilities to handle them. Policy analysts now argue that recycling alone cannot solve the problem. They favour measures such as requiring products to contain a minimum proportion of recycled content, making producers responsible for the cost of disposal, and, most fundamentally, reducing the amount of single-use packaging in circulation.
Read the passage and summarise it in ONE sentence of no more than 75 words.
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Model answer: Because sorting is costly, plastic degrades with reprocessing and virgin material is often cheaper, only a small share of plastic is actually recycled, so analysts argue that recycled-content requirements, producer responsibility and reductions in single-use packaging are needed alongside household recycling.
Write Essay
Write an essay of about 200-300 words on the topic.
Protecting endangered species and their habitats can be expensive and sometimes conflicts with local economic development. How should governments balance conservation with economic needs?
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Model answer: Conservation of endangered species frequently competes with pressing local economic needs, particularly in developing regions where communities depend on land or resources that also support threatened wildlife, and I believe the solution lies in aligning, rather than opposing, these two goals wherever possible.
Conservationists argue that once a species or habitat is lost, it cannot be recovered, and that biodiversity provides long-term benefits, including pollination, clean water and climate regulation, that far exceed the short-term gains from clearing land for farming or logging. Ecotourism built around protected wildlife can also generate sustainable income for local communities over many years, unlike a single harvest of timber or a short-lived mining operation.
At the same time, it is unrealistic to expect communities living in poverty to prioritise distant environmental goals over feeding their families, and conservation policies that ignore local economic reality often fail or provoke resentment, leading to poaching or illegal logging that undermines protection efforts altogether.
I believe the most effective approach combines strict legal protection for the most critical habitats with genuine investment in alternative livelihoods, such as guided wildlife tourism, sustainable agriculture and direct payment schemes that reward communities for preserving forests or wetlands rather than clearing them. International funding, from wealthier nations that benefit indirectly from global biodiversity, should support these programmes, since expecting the poorest regions to bear the full cost of global conservation alone is neither fair nor likely to succeed.
Reading
Reading & Writing: Fill in the Blanks
Select the best word for each blank.
Opera developed in Italy at the end of the sixteenth century, when a group of poets, musicians and scholars to revive what they believed to be the dramatic style of ancient Greek theatre, in which entire plays were thought to have been sung rather than merely spoken. Their experiments combined continuous singing with orchestral accompaniment to tell a complete dramatic story, a format that sharply from the separate songs and dances typical of earlier court entertainment. Early operas were performed for wealthy patrons and royal courts, but the genre soon spread to public theatres, paying audiences could attend performances built around dramatic plots, elaborate costumes and increasingly ambitious stage design. Composers across Europe adapted the form to their own musical traditions over the following centuries, producing the vast and varied operatic repertoire that be performed in opera houses worldwide today.
Multiple Choice, Choose Multiple Answers
Read the text and select all the correct answers.
Yawning is a behaviour shared by humans and many other vertebrates, yet its exact biological purpose remains debated among scientists. One long-standing theory suggested that yawning increases oxygen intake or expels excess carbon dioxide, but experiments in which subjects breathed air with altered oxygen and carbon dioxide levels failed to change yawning frequency, casting doubt on this explanation. A more recent theory proposes that yawning helps cool the brain, since the deep intake of air and stretching of the jaw during a yawn increases blood flow and airflow to the head, and studies have found that people yawn more frequently in moderate room temperatures than in very hot or very cold ones, a pattern consistent with a brain-cooling function. Yawning is also notably contagious: watching another person yawn, or even reading about yawning, can trigger a yawn in an observer, a phenomenon some researchers link to empathy, since contagious yawning appears to occur more often between people who know each other well than between strangers. Despite this progress, no single theory has yet been universally accepted, and yawning is frequently cited as an example of a common, everyday behaviour that remains surprisingly poorly understood.
1. According to the passage, which THREE 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.
Haiku is a traditional form of Japanese poetry consisting of just three short lines, generally following a pattern of seventeen syllables, that aims to a single vivid moment or observation, often drawn from nature. Because the form is so brief, a skilled poet must choose each word with extreme care, since haiku traditionally explicit explanation, relying instead on suggestion and a carefully placed image to convey deeper meaning. Many classic haiku include a specific seasonal reference, a convention that helps the poem in a particular moment of the year and connects it to a broader tradition of nature poetry. Although the form originated centuries ago, haiku remains widely practised today, with poets writing in dozens of languages adapting the tradition to their own cultural and linguistic context while still attempting to its essential brevity and focus on a single, clear image.
Multiple Choice, Choose Single Answer
Read the text and choose the best answer.
Brand positioning refers to the deliberate strategy a company uses to shape how consumers perceive its products relative to competing offerings within the same broad market, typically by emphasising a specific combination of attributes, such as quality, price, innovation or a particular emotional association, intended to distinguish the brand clearly from its rivals in a customer's mind. A company pursuing a premium positioning strategy, for example, might deliberately charge higher prices and invest heavily in sophisticated packaging and exclusive retail partnerships specifically to reinforce a consistent overall impression of superior quality and genuine exclusivity, even in cases where the product's actual underlying manufacturing cost differs only modestly from that of a considerably cheaper competing alternative. Successful positioning generally requires a company to maintain consistency across every aspect of its marketing, from advertising and packaging to pricing and even the customer service experience itself, since any single inconsistent element can noticeably undermine the intended overall positioning in a customer's perception. Marketing researchers emphasise that effective positioning depends not merely on a company's own internal marketing message, but critically on how the intended message is actually perceived and interpreted by real customers, meaning that companies must regularly research actual consumer perception rather than simply assuming their intended positioning has been successfully and accurately communicated.
3. According to the passage, what does effective brand positioning ultimately depend on?
Listening
Summarize Spoken Text
Listen to the recording, then write a summary.
Transcript (available after checking)
When Gutenberg introduced movable type in the middle of the fifteenth century, he didn't invent printing. Block printing already existed in China and Korea. What Gutenberg did was combine several existing technologies, including a modified wine press, oil-based ink and metal type, into a system that could produce books quickly and cheaply. Before that, a single book took a scribe months to copy, so books were luxury items owned by churches and the wealthy. Within fifty years, millions of printed books were circulating in Europe. Ideas travelled faster than ever before, and this helped fuel the Reformation, the Scientific Revolution and rising literacy. Historians disagree, however, about how much credit the press deserves. Some argue that social changes already under way created the demand, and the press simply met it. Most agree that it accelerated everything.
Write a summary of the lecture in 50–70 words.
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Model answer: Gutenberg combined existing technologies into a system that made books quick and cheap to produce, so millions circulated within fifty years, spreading ideas and supporting the Reformation and scientific progress. Historians debate whether the press caused these changes or merely met demand created by earlier social developments, but most agree it accelerated them.
Multiple Choice, Choose Multiple Answers
Listen and select all the correct answers.
Transcript (available after checking)
Many migratory birds fly thousands of kilometres and return to the same spot each year. To do this, they use several cues, including the position of the sun, patterns of stars at night, and landmarks. But researchers have also found evidence for a magnetic sense. Robins kept in a cage without any view of the sky still tried to hop in the correct direction for migration, and they changed direction when the magnetic field around the cage was altered. The mechanism is still debated. One leading theory suggests that special molecules in the bird's eye react to the magnetic field, so that birds might actually see a pattern superimposed on their vision. Another suggests tiny magnetic particles in the beak. Both may play a role, and the matter remains a topic of active research.
1. What does the speaker say about migratory birds?
Fill in the Blanks
Listen to the recording and type the missing words.
The ancient Maya developed one of the most sophisticated calendar systems in the ancient world, tracking time using several cycles at once. The Tzolkin, a religious calendar, combined twenty named days with a cycle of thirteen , producing a repeating cycle of two hundred and sixty days used for . Alongside it ran the Haab, a three hundred and sixty-five day calendar closer to the solar year, though it drifted out of sync with the actual . The Maya also tracked a much longer , letting them record stretching back thousands of years.
Highlight Correct Summary
Listen and choose the paragraph that best summarises the recording.
Transcript (available after checking)
Tea reached Britain in the seventeenth century as an expensive, exotic import from China, initially available mainly to the wealthy and sold partly through pharmacies as a supposed health tonic. Prices fell over the following century as trade expanded, and a fashion for tea-drinking spread through society, eventually becoming firmly associated with British national identity despite none of the tea being grown domestically. British interests later established enormous tea plantations in colonial India and Ceylon specifically to reduce dependence on imports from China, transforming the economies and landscapes of those regions and making tea far cheaper and more widely available at home. The now-familiar custom of afternoon tea developed later, in the nineteenth century, among the upper classes.
2. Which paragraph best summarises the recording?
Multiple Choice, Choose Single Answer
Listen and choose the best answer.
Transcript (available after checking)
Traditional straight razors required regular sharpening on a leather strop and considerable skill to use without cutting oneself, making a daily shave a genuinely risky task for an inexperienced user. In the late nineteenth century, an American inventor developed a razor with a thin, cheap, disposable steel blade held safely between two protective guard plates, so only a small edge of blade was exposed to the skin, dramatically reducing the risk of a serious cut. Because the blades were inexpensive to manufacture, the inventor deliberately sold the razor handle itself very cheaply, sometimes almost at a loss, expecting to profit instead from customers repeatedly buying replacement blades over time.
3. What was the inventor's business strategy for the safety razor, 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. The earliest postage stamps had no perforated edges at all, so postal workers had to carefully cut individual stamps apart from a large printed sheet using scissors, which was notoriously slow and often produced crooked edges. An English inventor later reportedly patented a machine that punched small lines of holes between each stamp, letting users simply tear them apart neatly by hand, a method basically still used on many stamps today.
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 34