A2–C2 · PTE Academic
PTE Academic Practice Test 45
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.
Astronomers detect planets around distant stars by measuring tiny dips in starlight. When a planet passes in front of its star, it blocks a small fraction of the light, and this regular dimming reveals both the planet's size and its orbit. Thousands of such worlds have now been catalogued.
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Model answer: Pronounce "astronomers" and "catalogued" carefully. Pause after "stars", "star" and "light". Stress "tiny dips" and "regular dimming". Close with a strong falling tone on "catalogued", giving "Thousands" extra energy at the start.
Memory is not a perfect recording of the past. Each time we recall an event, the brain reconstructs it, sometimes adding details that were never there. This is why eyewitnesses who are entirely sincere can nevertheless give inaccurate accounts of what they saw.
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Model answer: Stress "not a perfect recording". Pause after "event" and after "there". Slow down on "reconstructs" and "eyewitnesses". In the last sentence, stress "entirely sincere" and "nevertheless", and finish on "saw" with a clear downward tone.
Repeat Sentence
You will hear a sentence. Please repeat the sentence exactly as you hear it.
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Model answer: The lecturer asked whether anyone had questions about the homework.
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Model answer: Young people today are more likely to rent than to buy a home.
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Model answer: The essay should include an introduction, three main points and a conclusion.
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 graph shows how global temperature has differed from the mid-century average. Temperatures were slightly below average in 1900, at minus 0.2 degrees, and fell a little further by 1920. They rose to 0.1 in 1940 and returned to zero in 1960. After that the line climbs steadily, to 0.25 in 1980, 0.65 in 2000 and about 1 degree above average in 2020. The overall trend is clearly upward, especially after 1960.
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 fermentation preserved food long before refrigeration, with cultures worldwide independently developing foods like sauerkraut, yogurt, and miso. Bacteria or yeast convert sugars into acids or alcohol, blocking spoilage microbes while often improving nutrition. Renewed interest today connects fermented foods to gut bacteria and digestive health.
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 criticizes overtourism for damaging monuments and displacing locals through rising rents. Henry notes tourism revenue funds preservation work. Isla proposes managing visitor numbers through timed tickets and caps. The group agrees this should be combined with restricting short-term rental conversions, protecting both heritage sites and local housing without abandoning tourism revenue.
Respond to a Situation
Listen to the situation and respond as if you were in it.
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Model answer: I understand mistakes happen, but I have a confirmation email and a payment receipt for tonight and tomorrow. Could you please check under a different spelling of my name, or contact your booking system's support line? If there really is no room, I'd need you to arrange an equivalent room nearby at no extra cost tonight.
Writing
Summarize Written Text
Read the passage and write a one-sentence summary.
The gig economy, in which workers take short-term jobs arranged through digital platforms, is often presented as a liberating alternative to traditional employment. Drivers, couriers and freelance designers can decide when and how much they work, and the platforms give them immediate access to customers without the need for advertising or an office. For students, parents and those between careers, this flexibility can be valuable. Critics, however, point out that the freedom is frequently more apparent than real. Because most platform workers are classified as independent contractors, they typically receive no paid holiday, sick leave or pension contributions, and they bear the costs of fuel, equipment and insurance themselves. Earnings can fluctuate sharply depending on demand, and algorithms that assign work and rate performance leave individuals with little opportunity to negotiate or appeal. Surveys suggest that a considerable share of gig workers would prefer a stable contract if one were available. Several countries have begun to respond. Some courts have ruled that certain drivers are in fact employees, entitling them to minimum wage protections, while other governments are considering a third legal category that would provide limited benefits without fully abandoning flexibility. Platform companies warn that stricter rules could raise prices and reduce the number of available jobs, and the debate over how to balance flexibility with security remains unresolved.
Read the passage and summarise it in ONE sentence of no more than 75 words.
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Model answer: Although the gig economy offers workers flexibility, its independent-contractor model denies them benefits and bargaining power, and while courts and governments are experimenting with new protections, companies warn that tighter regulation could raise prices and reduce job opportunities.
Write Essay
Write an essay of about 200-300 words on the topic.
Some researchers claim that playing violent video games makes young people more aggressive in real life. Others say there is no proven link. What is your opinion?
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Model answer: Concern about a link between violent video games and real-world aggression resurfaces after almost every mass-media report of youth violence, yet I am not convinced that the connection is as strong as popular opinion suggests.
It is true that some laboratory studies have found that players show more aggressive thoughts or slightly quicker aggressive responses immediately after a violent game session. Given how vividly modern games simulate combat, it is reasonable to ask whether repeated exposure could normalise violence, especially for younger or more impressionable players.
However, large-scale reviews of the evidence, including studies following the same young people over many years, generally fail to find a reliable connection between playing violent games and committing violent acts. Countries with very high rates of video game use, such as Japan and South Korea, have some of the lowest violent crime rates in the world, which is difficult to reconcile with a simple cause-and-effect relationship. Genuine aggression in adolescence is more consistently linked to factors such as family conflict, exposure to real violence, and mental health difficulties.
I therefore believe that violent video games are, at most, a minor factor among many, rather than a primary cause of aggressive behaviour. Age ratings, parental awareness and encouraging a balance of activities remain sensible precautions, but blaming video games risks distracting policymakers from the social and psychological factors that matter far more.
Reading
Reading & Writing: Fill in the Blanks
Select the best word for each blank.
Long before paper currency became common elsewhere, merchants in China began promissory notes that could be exchanged for a fixed quantity of coins held safely in storage. This arrangement freed traders from the burden of carrying heavy metal coins over long distances, since a lightweight note the same value and could simply be exchanged later. Governments eventually recognised the advantages of this system and began issuing their own official paper currency, though early notes were only trusted people believed they could reliably be exchanged for precious metal on demand. Confidence in paper money occasionally collapsed when governments printed far more notes than they could realistically back, triggering rapid inflation that the currency's value almost overnight. Modern currencies no longer promise a fixed exchange for gold or silver, relying instead on public trust in the institutions issue and manage them.
Multiple Choice, Choose Multiple Answers
Read the text and select all the correct answers.
Honeybees construct their hives from a substance called beeswax, arranging it into a repeating pattern of six-sided cells known as a honeycomb. This hexagonal shape is not arbitrary: mathematicians have shown that hexagons tile a flat surface with no wasted gaps, using less wax to enclose a given amount of storage space than any other regularly repeating shape, including squares or triangles. Bees exploit this efficiency to store as much honey and pollen as possible while minimising the amount of wax, which is metabolically costly for the colony to produce, that must be used to build the structure. Remarkably, individual bees do not appear to plan the precise hexagonal shape in advance; instead, each bee builds a rough circular cell, and as neighbouring cells are built close together, the soft wax naturally settles into a hexagonal pattern under the combined pressure of adjacent cells, similar to the way bubbles settle into efficient shapes when packed tightly together. This combination of individual simple behaviour and emergent structural efficiency has made the honeycomb a frequently cited example in discussions of how complex, highly optimised patterns can arise from remarkably simple underlying rules.
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.
Telomeres are protective caps of repetitive genetic material found at the ends of chromosomes, which help a cell's genetic material from becoming damaged or tangled each time the cell divides. Every time a cell divides, its telomeres slightly, and after a certain number of divisions, telomeres become so short that the cell can no longer divide safely and typically enters a dormant state or dies. Because of this, telomere length is sometimes described, somewhat loosely, as a biological clock that can a cell's remaining capacity to divide, although researchers caution that many other biological factors also strongly influence overall aging and lifespan. Certain lifestyle factors, including chronic stress and smoking, have been associated in various studies with accelerated telomere shortening, while others, such as regular physical exercise, have sometimes been linked to somewhat slower shortening, though researchers caution against drawing overly strong conclusions from studies that generally only correlation rather than definitive proven causation. Some biotechnology companies have controversially marketed telomere-related tests directly to consumers, though most mainstream scientists remain sceptical about how reliably such simple tests can genuinely an individual's actual future health or realistic remaining lifespan.
Multiple Choice, Choose Single Answer
Read the text and choose the best answer.
As remote and hybrid work arrangements have become considerably more common, many organisations have had to substantially redesign their employee onboarding processes, which traditionally relied heavily on in-person office orientation, direct face-to-face introductions to colleagues and informal, largely unplanned learning that had naturally occurred simply by observing more experienced coworkers at close range in a shared physical office space. Remote onboarding instead requires organisations to deliberately and explicitly structure activities that might otherwise have happened naturally and informally in a shared physical workplace, such as scheduling regular virtual introductions to key colleagues, providing considerably more detailed written documentation of standard company processes, and assigning a specific, dedicated buddy or point of contact whom a genuinely confused new employee can comfortably approach with questions without the ease of simply glancing across a physical office to ask someone nearby. Research examining remote onboarding outcomes has found that new employees onboarded primarily or entirely remotely often report feeling less immediately connected to their new colleagues and less confident about workplace expectations during their initial weeks than employees onboarded in a traditional physical office setting, a genuine gap that some organisations have worked hard to specifically close through deliberately structured virtual social activities and considerably more frequent check-in meetings than would typically be scheduled for an equivalent new employee working from a shared physical office.
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)
More than two billion people live in regions with high water stress, and in several dry countries, desalination, the removal of salt from seawater, has become a major source of drinking water. Two methods dominate. Thermal desalination boils seawater and collects the steam, which is simple but uses much energy. Reverse osmosis, now more common, forces water through membranes that block the salt, and uses considerably less energy. Even so, desalination isn't a perfect answer. It produces a concentrated brine, which, if simply pumped back into the sea, can harm marine life near the outlet. It's also expensive, and the electricity it needs may come from fossil fuels. Because of these limitations, experts advise that desalination should complement other measures, including fixing leaking pipes, recycling wastewater and encouraging people to use less water, rather than replacing them.
Write a summary of the lecture in 50–70 words.
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Model answer: Desalination provides drinking water in dry regions using thermal methods or the more efficient reverse osmosis, but it is costly, energy-intensive and produces concentrated brine that can damage marine life. Experts therefore see it as a complement to repairing leaks, recycling wastewater and reducing consumption, not a replacement for them.
Multiple Choice, Choose Multiple Answers
Listen and select all the correct answers.
Transcript (available after checking)
Wind power is growing quickly, but there's a less glamorous side to it: what happens to the turbines when they wear out? Most of a turbine can be recycled, since the tower and gearbox are mainly steel. The blades are the difficulty. They're made from glass fibre and resin, designed to be light, strong and long-lasting, which makes them hard to separate into their parts. Until recently, old blades were usually buried in landfill. Now, engineers are experimenting. Some blades are ground up for cement production, others have been reused as bridges and playground equipment. A new type of resin that can be dissolved is promising, but it hasn't been widely adopted yet.
1. Which of the following are true according to the speaker?
Fill in the Blanks
Listen to the recording and type the missing words.
The exact inventor of eyeglasses remains uncertain, but historians generally trace them to northern Italy in the late thirteenth century, where craftsmen were already skilled at grinding glass . Early glasses corrected only farsightedness, since the more complex lenses needed for nearsightedness weren't developed until roughly two centuries . For a long time, eyeglasses had no arms to rest on the ears; instead they were held up by hand or tied on with , and rigid side arms only became in the eighteenth century. Before eyeglasses existed, ageing craftsmen often had to abandon detailed work once their declined.
Highlight Correct Summary
Listen and choose the paragraph that best summarises the recording.
Transcript (available after checking)
Graphite, the soft grey mineral used in pencil cores today, was initially mistaken for a form of lead when large deposits were discovered in England in the sixteenth century, which is why pencil cores are still sometimes casually called lead despite containing no lead at all. Early users simply wrapped raw graphite sticks in string or wood for a cleaner grip, and it wasn't until the late eighteenth century that manufacturers began mixing powdered graphite with clay and firing it, a technique that allowed the hardness and darkness of the resulting pencil core to be precisely controlled by adjusting the ratio of the two materials. This clay-graphite method, refined further over the following century, remains essentially the same process used to manufacture the vast majority of pencils today.
2. Which paragraph best summarises the recording?
Multiple Choice, Choose Single Answer
Listen and choose the best answer.
Transcript (available after checking)
Certain plants, most famously the sensitive plant, respond rapidly to touch by folding their leaves within seconds, a reaction triggered by a sudden change in water pressure inside specialised cells at the base of each leaf, causing the leaf to collapse mechanically rather than through anything resembling a nervous system. Researchers believe this rapid folding evolved mainly as a defence against being eaten, since a leaf that suddenly collapses may startle or deter a small insect, and the sudden movement itself may also dislodge insects attempting to settle on the leaf before feeding.
3. What does the speaker suggest is the purpose of the sensitive plant's rapid leaf folding?
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. Dolphins produce rapid clicking sounds that travel through water and quickly bounce off nearby objects, and by interpreting the returning echoes, a dolphin can build a precise mental picture of its surroundings even in completely dark water. This ability, called echolocation, lets dolphins reliably locate fish hidden in sand or stun prey using bursts of sound, and some researchers believe unusually loud clicks may briefly disorient smaller fish nearby.
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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