A2–C2 · PTE Academic
PTE Academic Practice Test 4
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.
Deserts are not always hot. Antarctica, with almost no rainfall, is technically the largest desert on Earth. Deserts are defined by low precipitation rather than temperature, and many, such as the Gobi, experience freezing winters as well as scorching summers.
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Model answer: Open with strong stress on "not always hot". Pause after "Antarctica" and "Earth". Pronounce "technically", "precipitation" and "Gobi" carefully. Contrast "freezing winters" with "scorching summers" and end with a falling tone.
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.
Repeat Sentence
You will hear a sentence. Please repeat the sentence exactly as you hear it.
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Model answer: Insects make up the largest group of animals on the planet.
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Model answer: The tutorial has been moved to room two hundred and four.
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Model answer: Cheap flights have made international travel available to millions of people.
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 shows how many books were borrowed from a city library in each genre during 2022. Children's books were the most popular with 61,000 loans, followed by crime fiction with 48,000. Romance came third at 36,000. Science fiction, biography and history were less popular, at 22,000, 18,000 and 15,000. The figures suggest that families and fiction readers are the library's main users.
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 before eighteen forty-six, surgery was excruciating and had to be fast since patients remained conscious. A public Boston demonstration that year proved ether could safely produce painless unconsciousness, a turning point in medicine. Chloroform followed with greater risks, and modern anesthesia now carefully balances pain relief, muscle relaxation, and vital monitoring.
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: Carla champions full remote work for eliminating commutes and boosting focus. Frank worries remote work weakens creativity and mentorship, especially for junior staff. Grace notes video collaboration tools have improved. They settle on a flexible hybrid model, with some in-person days for mentoring and collaboration decided by individual teams rather than imposed company-wide.
Respond to a Situation
Listen to the situation and respond as if you were in it.
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Model answer: I just counted this, and based on the exchange rate shown on your own board, this amount seems noticeably lower than it should be. Could you recalculate it with me here at the counter? I'd like to make sure the amount matches the rate you're actually displaying before I leave with it.
Writing
Summarize Written Text
Read the passage and write a one-sentence summary.
Fast fashion refers to clothing that is designed, manufactured and sold at great speed and low cost, so that stores can offer new collections every few weeks rather than every season. The model has made stylish garments affordable to millions of consumers, and it has created jobs in countries such as Bangladesh and Vietnam. Its environmental and social costs, however, are increasingly difficult to ignore. Producing a single cotton shirt can require thousands of litres of water, and dyeing and finishing textiles pollutes rivers near many factories. Synthetic fabrics derived from petroleum shed microfibres when washed, and the industry as a whole is estimated to account for around a tenth of global carbon emissions. Because garments are priced so cheaply, they are often worn only a handful of times before being discarded, and much of the resulting waste is burned or buried in landfill sites, since the blended fibres in modern clothing are hard to recycle. Labour conditions in the supply chain have also drawn criticism, especially since the collapse of a factory building in 2013 killed more than a thousand workers. Some brands now promote take-back schemes and collections made from recycled material, but sceptics argue that these gestures leave the underlying business model untouched. Genuine change, they contend, would require consumers to buy fewer items of better quality and companies to accept lower volumes.
Read the passage and summarise it in ONE sentence of no more than 75 words.
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Model answer: Although fast fashion provides cheap clothing and employment, its heavy use of water and synthetic fibres, high emissions, unrecyclable waste and poor labour conditions cause serious harm, and critics argue that only reduced consumption and lower production volumes would truly resolve these problems.
Write Essay
Write an essay of about 200-300 words on the topic.
Governments in many countries still provide financial subsidies to fossil fuel industries. Should these subsidies be phased out immediately, given their contribution to climate change?
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Model answer: Continuing to subsidise fossil fuel production while simultaneously pledging to reduce greenhouse gas emissions is, on the face of it, deeply inconsistent, and I believe these subsidies should be phased out, although doing so immediately and without preparation would create serious problems of its own.
The case against fossil fuel subsidies is compelling. Cheaper oil, coal and gas discourage investment in renewable alternatives, and public money that keeps these fuels artificially inexpensive both encourages higher consumption and diverts funding from clean energy infrastructure. Removing them would send a clear economic signal that reflects the true cost of fossil fuels, including their environmental damage, and would free significant government revenue for other priorities, including renewable energy and climate adaptation.
However, an abrupt end to subsidies would raise fuel and electricity prices overnight, hitting low-income households and energy-intensive industries hardest, and could provoke serious public and political backlash, as has occurred in several countries when fuel subsidies were cut suddenly. Businesses and workers in fossil fuel industries would also need time to adapt to reduced government support.
I therefore believe subsidies should be reduced gradually and predictably, on a clear published timetable, with targeted financial support for low-income households and retraining programmes for affected workers during the transition. This approach would still send the necessary long-term signal to markets and achieve the emissions benefits of ending subsidies, while avoiding the social and economic disruption of removing them without warning.
Reading
Reading & Writing: Fill in the Blanks
Select the best word for each blank.
Before the mid-nineteenth century, surgery was an agonising ordeal, since patients typically remained fully conscious while operations were as quickly as possible to limit their suffering. The introduction of ether and later chloroform as anaesthetic gases transformed surgery almost overnight, allowing patients to remain unconscious and free from pain procedures that had previously been unbearable. Surgeons, no longer under pressure to work at frantic speed, could operate more carefully and attempt procedures that would have been impossible on a fully conscious patient. Early anaesthetics were far from perfectly safe, however, and doctors had to learn through experience exactly how much gas to keep a patient safely unconscious without stopping their breathing entirely. Modern anaesthesia, refined over more than a century, now allows even lengthy and complex operations to be performed with a level of safety that earlier surgeons could barely have .
Multiple Choice, Choose Multiple Answers
Read the text and select all the correct answers.
A rainbow appears when sunlight passes into a raindrop, slows down and bends slightly at the point of entry, a process known as refraction, before reflecting off the inside of the droplet's back surface and bending again as it exits. Because light of different colours bends by very slightly different amounts as it passes through water, white sunlight separates into the familiar band of colours as it emerges from the droplet, with red appearing at one edge of the rainbow and violet at the other. Because this specific combination of refraction and reflection only produces visible colour at a particular angle relative to the sun and the observer, no two people ever see exactly the same rainbow; each observer sees light reflected from a personal, slightly different set of raindrops positioned precisely at the correct angle for their own eyes. Rainbows are also always positioned directly opposite the sun from the observer's point of view, which is why a rainbow appears when the sun is low in the sky and behind the viewer, and why one can never be seen at midday when the sun is directly overhead in most locations.
1. Which TWO statements are supported by 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.
Many companies choose to outsource manufacturing to factories in other countries, primarily to significantly lower labour and production costs than are available domestically. This strategy can allow a company to sell its products at a lower retail price, or alternatively to achieve considerably higher profit margins, while still remaining competitive within its particular industry. However, outsourcing production overseas also introduces certain risks, since a company must a supplier located in another country to maintain consistent quality standards without the same direct daily oversight that domestic production would generally allow. Long supply chains spanning multiple countries can also prove considerably more vulnerable to unexpected disruption, whether from natural disasters, political instability or sudden shipping delays, than a shorter, purely domestic supply chain would typically be. In recent years, some companies have begun to extensive overseas outsourcing, moving at least part of their production closer to their primary consumer markets in order to this vulnerability, even where doing so increases their overall production costs somewhat.
Multiple Choice, Choose Single Answer
Read the text and choose the best answer.
Predictive maintenance uses sensors attached directly to industrial machinery to continuously monitor specific operating conditions, such as vibration, temperature or sound, comparing this continuously collected real-time data against known established patterns that have previously and reliably indicated an approaching component failure in broadly similar equipment. Unlike traditional preventive maintenance, which instead simply replaces parts on a fixed, predetermined schedule regardless of a specific part's own actual current condition, predictive maintenance aims to replace a genuinely worn component only when meaningful, measurable sensor data actually and specifically indicates that a failure is becoming genuinely likely soon, potentially avoiding both an unnecessary, wasteful early replacement of a part still in good working condition and an unexpected, disruptive failure of a part that has been left in service considerably too long. Implementing an effective predictive maintenance programme generally requires a significant upfront investment in sensor hardware and specialised data analysis software, alongside the accumulation of a sufficiently large body of historical data to reliably and accurately establish what genuinely constitutes a normal, healthy operating pattern for a given specific piece of equipment, as opposed to an early, subtle warning sign of impending failure. Companies that have successfully implemented predictive maintenance report meaningfully reduced unplanned downtime alongside real cost savings from avoiding unnecessary early part replacements.
3. How does predictive maintenance differ from traditional preventive maintenance, according to the passage?
Listening
Summarize Spoken Text
Listen to the recording, then write a summary.
Transcript (available after checking)
In medicine, a placebo is a treatment with no active ingredient, such as a sugar pill. Remarkably, patients who receive placebos often report real improvements, especially in pain, nausea and depression. This is the placebo effect. Researchers believe it arises from expectation. When we expect to feel better, the brain can release natural painkillers and change how we interpret sensations. Interestingly, the effect sometimes works even when patients know they're taking a placebo, which suggests that the ritual of treatment plays a role too. It's important to understand what this does not mean. Placebos don't shrink tumours or cure infections. They mostly affect symptoms that depend on the brain's perception. That's why clinical trials compare new drugs against placebos: to separate a drug's real effect from the benefit that comes simply from believing you're being treated.
Write a summary of the lecture in 50–70 words.
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Model answer: The placebo effect is the genuine symptom relief people experience from inactive treatments, apparently because expectation triggers natural painkillers and alters perception, even when patients know it is a placebo. It does not cure diseases, which is why trials compare new drugs with placebos to separate the true effect of a drug from the improvement caused by belief alone.
Multiple Choice, Choose Multiple Answers
Listen and select all the correct answers.
Transcript (available after checking)
In nineteen hundred and one, divers exploring an ancient shipwreck off a Greek island recovered a corroded lump of bronze that turned out to be one of the most sophisticated devices to survive from the ancient world. Known as the Antikythera mechanism, it contains at least thirty interlocking gears and dates from around the second century BCE. Decades of research, aided eventually by X-ray imaging, revealed that it was used to predict the positions of the sun and moon, forecast eclipses, and track a four-year cycle of athletic games, including the Olympics. Nothing else of comparable mechanical complexity is known to have existed for well over a thousand years afterward, which puzzles historians, since it implies a tradition of precision engineering that otherwise left little trace in the historical record. Researchers still debate exactly who built it and how many similar devices may have existed.
1. Which THREE facts about the Antikythera mechanism are given?
Fill in the Blanks
Listen to the recording and type the missing words.
Not every bird builds a simple cup-shaped nest. Weaver birds construct hanging structures woven from grass, with a narrow entrance tunnel that makes it harder for to reach the eggs. Tailorbirds actually stitch leaves together using plant fibres as thread, sewing a for their nest. Some species build no nest at all and simply lay eggs on bare . Researchers believe nest design reflects a trade-off between protecting eggs and the cost of building, and birds of the same species can adjust their depending on local conditions.
Highlight Correct Summary
Listen and choose the paragraph that best summarises the recording.
Transcript (available after checking)
Many salmon species are born in freshwater rivers, migrate downstream to spend most of their adult lives in the ocean, and then return, sometimes years later, to the exact river, and often the exact stretch of river, where they hatched, in order to spawn themselves before dying shortly afterward. Researchers believe salmon navigate the open ocean partly using the Earth's magnetic field, but that once they approach coastal waters, they rely heavily on distinguishing the unique chemical scent of their home river, memorised as juveniles before they first swam out to sea. This remarkable precision makes salmon runs vulnerable to any change in a river's chemistry or flow, including dams that block passage entirely, which is why some dams now include specially engineered fish ladders that allow returning salmon to bypass the obstruction and continue upstream to spawn.
2. Which paragraph best summarises the recording?
Multiple Choice, Choose Single Answer
Listen and choose the best answer.
Transcript (available after checking)
Roman numerals, using letters such as I, V, X, L, C, D and M, were the standard counting system across much of Europe for centuries, but they're poorly suited to arithmetic, since there's no simple way to add or multiply two Roman numerals directly the way digit-based addition works. Merchants and scholars typically used a separate tool, an abacus, to perform actual calculations, only converting the final result into Roman numerals for writing down. The system was gradually replaced by the Hindu-Arabic numerals familiar today, which spread from around the twelfth century onward because they made calculation far easier.
3. Why does the speaker say Roman numerals were poorly suited to daily use?
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. Unlike most birds, a hummingbird can genuinely hover in place by beating its wings in a swift figure-eight pattern, generating thrust on both the forward and backward stroke rather than only on the downstroke. This demanding flight style burns energy so quickly that a hummingbird must feed constantly, and its heart can exceed well over a thousand beats per minute during the most active periods of flight.
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
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