A2–C2 · PTE Academic
PTE Academic Practice Test 36
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.
Ancient Egyptian civilisation depended on the annual flooding of the Nile. Each summer the river deposited rich silt across its banks, allowing farmers to grow wheat and barley in an otherwise arid landscape. This predictable abundance supported a large population and a powerful state.
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Model answer: Watch "civilisation" and "annual". Pause after "Nile", "silt" and "barley". Stress "rich silt" and "otherwise arid landscape". The last sentence should sound like a conclusion: emphasise "predictable abundance" and drop your pitch on "powerful state".
Philosophers have long debated whether free will is compatible with a universe governed by natural laws. Determinists argue that every decision is the inevitable result of earlier causes, whereas others maintain that meaningful choice remains possible even within a lawful world.
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Model answer: Read slowly; this text is dense. Stress "long debated", "free will" and "natural laws". Pause after "laws" and after "causes". Use contrast on "whereas others" and articulate "inevitable" and "meaningful" clearly. Fall on "lawful world".
Repeat Sentence
You will hear a sentence. Please repeat the sentence exactly as you hear it.
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Model answer: Ancient Greek philosophers asked questions that people still discuss today.
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Model answer: Registration for the winter term begins on the second of December.
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Model answer: The lecture theatre was almost empty because of the train strike.
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 the proportion of electricity produced from renewable sources in seven countries in 2022. Norway is far ahead with 98 percent, and Brazil follows with 89 percent. Germany and Spain are in the middle at 46 and 43 percent. The lowest figures belong to the United States and Japan, at only 22 and 21 percent. So there is a very wide gap between leading and lagging nations.
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 explains that microplastics, fragments under five millimeters, are now found throughout rivers, soil, and animal bodies worldwide. Sources include degrading plastic waste, synthetic clothing fibers, and cosmetic microbeads. Small organisms ingest them, allowing plastics to move up the food chain, and the lecturer stresses that preventing plastic waste is easier than removing microplastics later.
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: Jack supports banning single-use plastic bags to protect waterways and marine life. Anna warns that alternatives like paper or thick reusable bags can have worse lifecycle impacts if not properly reused. David and Jack propose pairing the ban with public education and a small fee to encourage genuine reuse, and Anna accepts this combined approach as more thorough.
Respond to a Situation
Listen to the situation and respond as if you were in it.
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Model answer: I've noticed you've missed two deadlines this month, which is unusual for you, and I wanted to check in properly rather than just focus on the numbers. Is everything alright? Whatever's going on, I'd like to find a workable solution together, but I also need us to plan how to manage the current workload going forward.
Writing
Summarize Written Text
Read the passage and write a one-sentence summary.
Africa is urbanising faster than any other continent. Lagos, Kinshasa and Dar es Salaam are each adding hundreds of thousands of residents every year, and by 2050 roughly six in ten Africans are expected to live in towns and cities. Economists have traditionally regarded urbanisation as a driver of prosperity, since concentrated populations allow specialisation, lower the cost of providing services and attract investment. In much of Africa, however, the process has followed a different pattern. In many countries, people have moved to cities not because factories were hiring but because rural livelihoods were failing or conflict had driven them from their homes, and the growth of urban populations has outpaced the creation of formal jobs. As a result, a majority of urban residents work in the informal sector, as street vendors, market traders and casual labourers, and about half of the population of many cities lives in informal settlements lacking secure tenure, piped water or sanitation. Planners argue that the priority should be to invest in basic infrastructure ahead of demand, including roads, drains and public transport, and to give residents legal rights to their land so that they will invest in improving their homes. Some cities have experimented with community-led upgrading schemes, in which residents help to design and manage improvements, and early results suggest that these can be cheaper and more durable than top-down projects.
Read the passage and summarise it in ONE sentence of no more than 75 words.
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Model answer: African cities are growing rapidly without a matching increase in formal jobs, leaving many residents in informal work and settlements, so planners recommend early infrastructure investment, secure land rights and community-led upgrading, which appears cheaper and more lasting than schemes imposed from above.
Write Essay
Write an essay of about 200-300 words on the topic.
In many countries, the gap between the highest and lowest wages has grown significantly in recent decades. Should governments set a maximum limit on how much executives can earn?
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Model answer: As executive pay has risen far faster than average wages in many industries, calls to cap it by law have grown louder. I understand the frustration behind this idea, but I do not think a strict legal maximum is the right solution.
Those in favour argue that when a chief executive earns hundreds of times more than an ordinary employee, it damages morale, widens inequality and rewards short-term share price gains rather than the long-term health of a company. A cap, they say, would redirect resources towards wages, staff training or investment, and would signal that extreme pay gaps are socially unacceptable.
However, a fixed legal ceiling has serious drawbacks. Talented leaders might simply move to countries or industries without such restrictions, and companies could respond by classifying pay as bonuses, shares or other benefits that a straightforward salary cap would not capture. Determining a fair limit across vastly different industries, from banking to manufacturing, would also be extremely difficult, and heavy-handed regulation risks discouraging investment.
A more workable approach, in my opinion, is to require companies to publish the ratio between executive and average worker pay, give shareholders a binding vote on remuneration packages, and tax very high incomes more progressively. These measures apply pressure and transparency without the rigidity of an arbitrary cap, and they allow companies to retain some flexibility while making extreme pay gaps politically and reputationally costly.
Reading
Reading & Writing: Fill in the Blanks
Select the best word for each blank.
Long before written records existed, communities oral tradition to preserve genealogies, laws and significant events across generations. Skilled storytellers memorised enormous quantities of material, often using rhythm, repetition and song to make the content easier to accurately. Anthropologists who have studied such traditions note that certain details, particularly names and numbers, were sometimes altered slightly with each retelling, the overall structure of the narrative tended to remain stable. This has led historians to treat oral accounts as valuable but imperfect evidence, useful for general patterns of past events even when precise details cannot be verified. In several societies today, efforts are underway to record elderly speakers before this knowledge is entirely.
Multiple Choice, Choose Multiple Answers
Read the text and select all the correct answers.
As manufacturing has declined in many cities that once relied heavily on heavy industry, planners and developers have increasingly turned to adaptive reuse, converting old factories, warehouses and power stations into apartments, offices, galleries or public spaces rather than demolishing them outright. Supporters of this approach argue that reusing an existing structure is often considerably more sustainable than demolition and new construction, since it avoids the substantial carbon emissions associated with producing fresh concrete and steel, while also preserving buildings that carry genuine architectural or historical significance within a community's industrial heritage. Adaptive reuse projects can also be more cost-effective than entirely new construction in some cases, since a building's existing structural frame, foundations and sometimes distinctive architectural features can be retained and incorporated into the new design rather than rebuilt from scratch. However, converting an industrial building for residential or public use is not always straightforward, since older structures often require extensive work to meet modern safety, insulation and accessibility standards, and site contamination from decades of industrial use must sometimes be identified and cleaned up before redevelopment can safely proceed, adding considerable cost and time to a project that might, on the surface, have appeared to be a simple renovation.
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.
Corporate social responsibility refers to voluntary efforts by companies to consider the social and environmental effects of their operations, beyond the requirements set by law. Proponents argue that adopting genuine social responsibility can benefit a company's long-term reputation and even its profitability, since increasing numbers of consumers actively prefer to businesses whose practices align with their own personal values. Critics, however, contend that some corporate social responsibility initiatives amount to little more than a public relations exercise designed to a company's public image, without producing any meaningful change to its actual core business practices. Independent auditing and transparent public reporting have therefore become increasingly important tools for whether a company's social responsibility claims are genuinely substantiated by measurable action, rather than existing only within promotional marketing materials. Investors interested specifically in socially responsible companies increasingly rely on these independent assessments to their investment decisions.
Multiple Choice, Choose Single Answer
Read the text and choose the best answer.
The modern welfare state, in which governments provide a range of social protections such as healthcare, unemployment benefits and old-age pensions, developed gradually over more than a century, though its emergence accelerated considerably following the widespread economic hardship of the Great Depression and the social disruption caused by two world wars. Earlier, more limited social insurance programmes, including some of the first government-provided pensions and health insurance schemes introduced in late nineteenth-century Germany, were partly motivated by a desire to reduce the growing political appeal of more radical socialist movements among industrial workers, by demonstrating that existing governments could also meaningfully address the genuine economic insecurity many workers faced. After the Second World War, several European countries substantially expanded these earlier, more limited programmes into comprehensive welfare states, motivated partly by a strong postwar political consensus that governments bore some meaningful responsibility for citizens' basic economic security, and partly by a specific determination to avoid the severe social instability that had characterised the period between the two world wars. Since then, the appropriate scope and generosity of welfare states has remained a recurring subject of vigorous political debate in many countries, as governments continue to weigh the social benefits of these substantial programmes against their often considerable ongoing fiscal cost.
3. According to the passage, what partly motivated Germany's early social insurance programmes?
Listening
Summarize Spoken Text
Listen to the recording, then write a summary.
Transcript (available after checking)
The Silk Road wasn't a single road at all but a network of trade routes linking China with the Mediterranean, stretching over more than six thousand kilometres. Few merchants travelled the whole distance. Instead, goods passed from trader to trader, gaining value at every stage. Silk was the most famous product, but caravans also carried spices, glass, horses, paper and precious metals. Just as important were the things that couldn't be weighed. Religions such as Buddhism and later Islam travelled along these routes, as did technologies, artistic styles and, unfortunately, diseases. Oasis towns like Samarkand grew rich by serving travellers. The network declined when sea routes became cheaper and safer, and when political changes made overland travel more dangerous. Today, historians use the term Silk Road to highlight an early example of cultural exchange across huge distances.
Write a summary of the lecture in 50–70 words.
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Model answer: The Silk Road was a network of routes on which goods passed between many traders, carrying silk, spices and paper as well as religions, technologies and diseases, and enriching oasis towns like Samarkand. It declined as sea routes became cheaper and safer, but remains an example of early cultural exchange.
Multiple Choice, Choose Multiple Answers
Listen and select all the correct answers.
Transcript (available after checking)
Most plants use a process called C3 photosynthesis, but around three percent of plant species, including maize and sugar cane, use a different route known as C4. The difference lies in how they capture carbon dioxide. C4 plants have a special mechanism that concentrates carbon dioxide around the enzyme that builds sugars. This reduces a wasteful side reaction, called photorespiration, which is worse in hot weather. As a result, C4 plants are more efficient in high temperatures and bright sunlight, and they lose less water. There's now an international research project trying to introduce C4 features into rice, which is a C3 plant. If it works, yields could increase substantially, but engineering such a complex system is a huge challenge that will take many years.
1. What does the speaker say about C4 plants?
Fill in the Blanks
Listen to the recording and type the missing words.
Long before mechanical clocks, ancient civilisations tracked time using shadows cast by sundials, or by measuring how quickly water dripped from one container into in a device called a water clock. Both had limits: sundials were useless at night, while water clocks needed careful calibration and drifted as the container gradually . Mechanical clocks driven by a weight and a toothed mechanism called an escapement appeared in Europe around the thirteenth century, working regardless of , though early versions were inaccurate by minutes each . Precision improved once pendulum clocks arrived in the seventeenth .
Highlight Correct Summary
Listen and choose the paragraph that best summarises the recording.
Transcript (available after checking)
Early moving staircases, patented in the eighteen nineties, were viewed initially as a novelty amusement ride rather than practical transport, and one early version installed at an amusement park moved passengers on a slightly inclined belt with no actual steps, resembling a gently moving ramp more than a modern escalator. Practical step-based escalators, closer to today's design, with individual segments that stayed level as they moved and folded flat at the top and bottom, were refined in the early twentieth century and installed in department stores, where owners found that a working escalator, novel and exciting to most shoppers at the time, encouraged customers to browse multiple floors far more readily than a plain staircase ever could. Escalators later became essential in high-traffic locations such as train stations and airports, where they move far more people per minute than stairs alone possibly could.
2. Which paragraph best summarises the recording?
Multiple Choice, Choose Single Answer
Listen and choose the best answer.
Transcript (available after checking)
For most of the bicycle's history, riders wore no head protection at all, and it wasn't until growing awareness of head injury risks in the later twentieth century that manufacturers began producing cycling helmets, initially aimed mainly at racers rather than everyday riders. Early foam helmets gave only modest protection and were often uncomfortable, discouraging casual use, but materials improved substantially over subsequent decades, producing lighter, better-ventilated helmets far more comfortable for commuting. Some regions eventually introduced mandatory helmet laws for cyclists, a policy that remains debated, since some researchers argue it can discourage cycling by making it seem more dangerous.
3. What concern do some researchers raise about mandatory helmet laws, 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. Many small fish species swim in tightly coordinated schools mainly as a defence against predators, since a large, constantly shifting mass of fish can disorient a hunting predator trying to target a single individual. Schooling also reportedly reduces each fish's individual chance of being caught, a principle sometimes called safety in numbers, and it may additionally limit swimming efficiency by letting fish draft off each other's movements closely.
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 37