A2–C2 · PTE Academic
PTE Academic Practice Test 38
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.
Language is constantly evolving. New words appear through technology and popular culture, older words shift in meaning, and pronunciation changes from one generation to the next. What sounds incorrect to one speaker may be perfectly ordinary to another.
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Model answer: Open with emphasis on "constantly evolving". Pause after "culture" and after "meaning". Give "one generation to the next" a smooth rhythm. In the last sentence, contrast "incorrect" with "perfectly ordinary" and fall on "another".
A balanced diet includes a variety of foods from each main group: vegetables and fruit, whole grains, protein and dairy. Nutritionists caution that no single food supplies every nutrient, and that occasional treats need not spoil an otherwise healthy pattern of eating.
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Model answer: Pause after "group" and after the colon, then list the four items with rising tone and a falling tone on "dairy". Stress "no single food" and "occasional treats". Say "nutritionists" and "nutrient" clearly. Close on "eating" with a falling tone.
Repeat Sentence
You will hear a sentence. Please repeat the sentence exactly as you hear it.
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Model answer: Our biology professor is known for her clear and lively explanations.
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Model answer: Bees play a vital role in pollinating crops and wild flowers.
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Model answer: Our guest speaker will talk about careers in the film industry.
Describe Image
Describe the image in detail.
| Calories | Protein (g) | Fat (g) | |
|---|---|---|---|
| White rice (cooked) | 130 | 2.7 | 0.3 |
| Chicken breast | 165 | 31 | 3.6 |
| Avocado | 160 | 2 | 15 |
| Lentils (cooked) | 116 | 9 | 0.4 |
| Cheddar cheese | 403 | 25 | 33 |
| Banana | 89 | 1.1 | 0.3 |
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 table compares the nutritional content of six foods per 100 grams. Cheddar cheese has the most calories, 403, and the most fat, 33 grams. Chicken breast has the highest protein content, 31 grams, with only 3.6 grams of fat. Avocado is also fatty at 15 grams but has little protein. Banana, at 89 calories, is the lightest food, and lentils offer a good balance of 9 grams of protein with almost no fat.
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 invasive plants, introduced without natural predators or competitors, spread aggressively, as with kudzu in the southeastern United States, originally planted for erosion control but now smothering native vegetation. Invasive species cause billions in economic damage and are a leading cause of biodiversity loss, with control ranging from removal to risky predator introduction.
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: Ben advocates for greater student choice in curriculum to boost motivation. Carla worries students might avoid genuinely important foundational subjects. David proposes keeping a minimal mandatory core with electives beyond that. All three agree on this split, provided the core stays genuinely minimal and is periodically reviewed to prevent it from expanding back into a rigid system.
Respond to a Situation
Listen to the situation and respond as if you were in it.
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Model answer: My membership renewed automatically at a significantly higher rate, and I received no advance notice before the charge went through. I was traveling abroad without internet access right around the renewal date and had intended to cancel beforehand. Could you please cancel this renewal and refund the charge, given I never received proper notice or a chance to respond.
Writing
Summarize Written Text
Read the passage and write a one-sentence summary.
Before the Industrial Revolution, most people in Britain lived in rural communities and earned their living from farming or small-scale crafts. The spread of mechanised factories from the late eighteenth century drew workers into rapidly growing towns, where they laboured for long hours in noisy and often dangerous conditions. For decades, historians disagreed about whether these workers were better or worse off than their ancestors. Optimists pointed to rising national output and argued that industrial employment eventually raised living standards. Pessimists countered that early industrial wages barely moved while workers suffered overcrowded housing, polluted air and epidemic disease. Recent statistical research has helped to reconcile these views. By reconstructing prices and earnings from surviving records, economists have concluded that real wages for the average labourer stagnated for roughly the first half-century of industrialisation, even though the economy was expanding, and that the height of army recruits, a good indicator of nutrition, actually fell in some cities. Substantial improvement began only from around the 1840s, when productivity gains finally translated into higher pay, cheaper food and public investment in sanitation. The lesson many scholars draw is that technological progress does not automatically benefit everyone at once, and that the distribution of its rewards depends on political choices, such as labour legislation and public health reform, as much as on machines.
Read the passage and summarise it in ONE sentence of no more than 75 words.
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Model answer: Statistical evidence indicates that ordinary workers gained little from the early Industrial Revolution, with wages stagnating and health suffering for about fifty years, so improvements came only later, suggesting that the benefits of technological progress depend on political decisions as well as on new machinery.
Write Essay
Write an essay of about 200-300 words on the topic.
Some courts have recognised a 'right to be forgotten', allowing individuals to request that search engines remove outdated or embarrassing information about them. Is this a fair balance between privacy and public information?
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Model answer: The right to be forgotten, which lets individuals ask search engines to delist certain results about them, attempts to balance two values that often conflict: personal privacy and the public's access to information. I believe the principle is reasonable, provided it is applied narrowly.
People change over time, and a minor mistake, an old news story taken out of context, or information that was once relevant but is now irrelevant, can follow someone indefinitely online, affecting their employment prospects or relationships years later out of proportion to its original significance. Allowing individuals a route to request removal of such material, particularly when there is no ongoing public interest, gives people a realistic chance to move on from their past in a way that was simply not possible before search engines made information so permanent and easy to find.
At the same time, an unrestricted right to be forgotten could be misused by public figures seeking to hide legitimate criticism, financial misconduct or past crimes that remain genuinely relevant to the public interest, and it places search engines, rather than courts or elected bodies, in the difficult position of deciding what information the public should be able to find.
For this reason, I believe removal requests should be assessed against clear criteria, weighing the ongoing public interest and the person's current role against the harm caused by outdated information, ideally with a right of appeal to an independent body rather than leaving the decision entirely to private companies.
Reading
Reading & Writing: Fill in the Blanks
Select the best word for each blank.
Octopuses possess a nervous system quite unlike that of most other animals, with roughly two-thirds of their neurons not in a central brain but distributed along their eight arms. This unusual arrangement allows each arm to process sensory information and semi-independently, even solving simple problems such as untangling itself without direct input from the brain. In laboratory experiments, octopuses have learned to open jars, navigate mazes and even recognise individual human handlers, abilities that surprised researchers who had long assumed such intelligence vertebrates. Because octopuses are solitary and typically live for only a year or two, scientists remain puzzled about why such sophisticated cognitive abilities in a creature with so little opportunity to pass on learned behaviour to offspring. Their intelligence continues to challenge simple assumptions the relationship between brain size, structure and cognitive ability.
Multiple Choice, Choose Multiple Answers
Read the text and select all the correct answers.
The market for second-hand clothing has expanded rapidly in recent years, driven partly by online resale platforms that make it far easier for individuals to buy and sell used garments than traditional charity shops or flea markets once allowed. For sellers, these platforms offer a straightforward way to recover some of the original cost of clothing that would otherwise sit unused in a wardrobe, while buyers can access well-known brands at a fraction of their original retail price, often in near-new condition. Environmental campaigners have generally welcomed this growth, arguing that extending the useful life of an existing garment reduces the demand for newly manufactured clothing, which typically carries a substantial environmental cost in water use, chemical dyes and carbon emissions during production. However, some researchers caution that the environmental benefit of second-hand shopping can be partly offset if consumers simply use resale platforms to buy additional clothing they would not otherwise have purchased at all, rather than genuinely replacing new purchases with used ones, a pattern that would increase overall consumption rather than reducing it. Despite this uncertainty, most analysts agree that a thriving resale market is preferable to large quantities of usable clothing being discarded directly into landfill.
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.
Literary historians often trace the emergence of the modern English novel to the early eighteenth century, when a growing middle-class readership with disposable income and leisure time created new demand for extended prose fiction. Unlike the epic poems and classical tales that had previously literary culture, these new novels focused on the everyday lives and moral struggles of ordinary, often fictional individuals rather than mythical heroes or aristocrats. The expansion of printing and a growing network of lending libraries helped access to novels well beyond the wealthy readers who had previously been the primary market for expensive printed books. Some critics of the period worried that novels, particularly among younger or female readers, might unrealistic expectations about romance and daily life. Despite such criticism, the novel steadily grew in respectability and popularity, eventually becoming the dominant literary form it remains widely considered today.
Multiple Choice, Choose Single Answer
Read the text and choose the best answer.
Edge computing refers to a computing approach in which data is processed physically close to where it is actually generated and collected, such as directly on or near a sensor or connected device, rather than being transmitted first across a network to a distant, centralised data centre for processing before any response can be generated. This approach can significantly reduce the delay, commonly referred to as latency, between data being collected and a corresponding response being generated, an advantage that proves particularly valuable for applications requiring an extremely fast response time, such as autonomous vehicles that must react to changing road conditions within an exceedingly small fraction of a second, well before a round trip to a distant data centre could realistically be completed. Edge computing can also meaningfully reduce the sheer total volume of data that must be transmitted across a network, since much of the necessary initial data processing occurs locally, at or very near the edge of the network, with typically only the most essential, already-processed results subsequently sent onward to a central system. This approach, however, generally requires deploying and carefully maintaining considerably more distributed processing hardware across numerous different physical locations than a single, simpler centralised data centre model would otherwise require, meaningfully increasing the overall complexity involved in maintaining an edge computing system.
3. What is the main idea of the passage?
Listening
Summarize Spoken Text
Listen to the recording, then write a summary.
Transcript (available after checking)
Let me explain what a blockchain is without the usual jargon. Imagine a notebook that many people keep identical copies of. Each page records a group of transactions, and every new page also includes a fingerprint of the page before it. If someone tried to secretly change an old entry, the fingerprint would no longer match, and everyone else's copies would reveal the fraud. That's the basic idea: a shared record that is very hard to alter after the fact. Cryptocurrencies were the first big application, but the technology has been proposed for tracking food shipments, recording property ownership and verifying certificates. Now, it isn't always the best tool. A blockchain is slower and uses more energy than an ordinary database, so it makes sense mainly where participants don't trust one another and there's no central authority everybody accepts.
Write a summary of the lecture in 50–70 words.
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Model answer: A blockchain is a shared record copied among many participants, where each block contains a fingerprint of the previous one, so changing past entries is easily detected. It suits situations where parties distrust each other and lack a central authority, but it is slower and more energy-hungry than an ordinary database.
Multiple Choice, Choose Multiple Answers
Listen and select all the correct answers.
Transcript (available after checking)
Tourism brings money to poor regions, but too many visitors can destroy what they come to see. Some cities now struggle with overtourism, where crowds push up rents and make life difficult for local residents. Sustainable tourism tries to balance the interests of visitors, communities and the environment. In practice, this can mean limiting the number of daily visitors to fragile sites, charging entry fees that pay for conservation, and encouraging tourists to travel outside the peak season. Travellers can also help by staying in locally owned accommodation, eating local food, and choosing trains over short flights. Not all measures are welcomed. Some people argue that visitor caps favour wealthy travellers, and that tourism workers depend on high numbers for their income. Finding fair solutions is therefore a matter of ongoing debate.
1. Which of the following are given as examples of sustainable tourism?
Fill in the Blanks
Listen to the recording and type the missing words.
A suspension bridge holds its roadway using cables draped between tall towers, anchored firmly into the ground so the deck's weight is carried mainly through in the cables. Arch bridges work almost the opposite way, channelling weight downward through into solid supports at each end, which is why stone arches built thousands of years ago can still stand without steel . Engineers choose a design partly based on the span required; suspension bridges suit very long , while shorter gaps are often more efficient as simple beam or structures.
Highlight Correct Summary
Listen and choose the paragraph that best summarises the recording.
Transcript (available after checking)
No single ant directs a colony's behaviour, yet ant colonies routinely make sophisticated collective decisions, such as choosing the best of several possible new nest sites. Scout ants explore candidate sites individually and, if a site seems good, recruit other ants by leaving a stronger trail of chemical pheromone leading to it. Because better sites attract faster, stronger recruitment, more ants end up visiting the best option, and a positive feedback loop rapidly channels the whole colony toward it, often before most ants have personally compared multiple sites. Researchers see this as a natural example of decentralised decision-making, comparable in some ways to how neurons in a brain reach a collective decision without any single neuron understanding the whole picture.
2. Which paragraph best summarises the recording?
Multiple Choice, Choose Single Answer
Listen and choose the best answer.
Transcript (available after checking)
Fireflies produce light through a chemical reaction inside special organs in their abdomen, and most species use specific, distinctive flash patterns, timed sequences of light and darkness, to identify their own species and attract a mate of the opposite sex in the dark. Females of many species remain in one place and answer a passing male's flash with their own flash, timed precisely, and a male continues toward her only if the timing matches what his species expects. Some firefly species even mimic another species' flash pattern specifically to lure and eat its approaching males.
3. Why do some firefly species mimic another species' flash pattern, 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 word search puzzle, in which players locate hidden words neatly arranged in a grid of letters, is generally credited to an American puzzle-maker who published the first known example in a regional newspaper in nineteen sixty-eight. The format proved fairly simple to design by hand but absorbing enough to entertain readers, and it quickly spread to other newspapers and activity books rather widely within a few years.
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 39