A2–C2 · PTE Academic
PTE Academic Practice Test 47
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.
Cities around the world are planting trees to combat the urban heat island effect. Shade from a mature tree can lower surface temperatures by several degrees, and leaves release moisture that cools the surrounding air. Trees also absorb pollutants and provide habitat for birds and insects.
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Model answer: Stress "combat" and "several degrees". Pause after "effect", "degrees" and "air". Pronounce "pollutants" and "habitat" precisely. Lift on "birds and insects" before the final falling tone.
Public transport reduces congestion and lowers emissions, yet many people still prefer to drive. Convenience, comfort and unreliable timetables are the most common reasons. Cities that invest in frequent, affordable services often see a noticeable shift in commuting habits.
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Model answer: Pause after "emissions" and after "drive". Stress "yet" to mark the contrast. Give the list "Convenience, comfort and unreliable timetables" a steady rhythm. Emphasise "frequent, affordable" and "noticeable shift", then fall on "habits".
Repeat Sentence
You will hear a sentence. Please repeat the sentence exactly as you hear it.
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Model answer: The river flooded several villages after three days of heavy rain.
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Model answer: Scientists have recently discovered a new species of deep-sea octopus.
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Model answer: Although he was nervous, he delivered the speech with confidence.
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 monthly visitors to a history museum in 2023. The museum is quietest in January, with 38,000 visitors, and numbers rise through spring to 70,000 in April. There is a small dip in May before the summer peak: 95,000 in July and 110,000 in August, the highest of the year. Visits then fall to 45,000 in November and recover slightly to 58,000 in December. Summer is clearly the busiest season.
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 offshore wind farms benefit from stronger, steadier winds and can use larger turbines than onshore sites, but face higher construction and maintenance costs due to marine conditions and underwater cabling needs. New floating turbine platforms are being developed to reach deeper waters unsuitable for fixed foundations, expanding potential offshore wind sites.
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: Isla favors rapid nuclear expansion for reliable low-carbon power. Jack questions nuclear's long construction timelines given climate urgency. Anna raises safety and waste concerns from past accidents. The group converges on a combined approach, expanding renewables while using nuclear as a safer, well-funded bridge technology during the transition, rather than relying on either alone.
Respond to a Situation
Listen to the situation and respond as if you were in it.
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Model answer: I received a laptop with a cracked screen, clearly damaged before it left your warehouse, and I have photos showing the packaging was intact. I recycled the outer box before noticing the damage, but the product itself and all included accessories are untouched. Could you process a replacement or refund without requiring the original box in this case?
Writing
Summarize Written Text
Read the passage and write a one-sentence summary.
Noise is usually regarded as a nuisance rather than a health hazard, but a growing body of research suggests otherwise. The World Health Organization estimates that in Western Europe alone, traffic noise causes the loss of over a million healthy life years annually, chiefly through sleep disturbance and heart disease. The mechanism appears to be physiological rather than merely psychological. Even while we sleep, the body reacts to sudden sounds such as a passing lorry or aircraft by releasing stress hormones and raising blood pressure, and repeated activation over years is associated with hypertension and an increased risk of heart attack. Children are especially affected: studies of pupils in schools beneath airport flight paths have found lower reading scores and poorer memory than in comparable quiet schools. Noise also has an economic dimension, since properties in loud areas lose value and those who can afford to move away tend to do so, leaving poorer residents to endure the worst conditions. Remedies exist but require coordinated action. Quieter road surfaces and electric vehicles reduce traffic noise at source, barriers and double glazing limit its transmission, and planning rules can keep housing and schools away from major roads and flight paths. Restrictions on night flights are a further option, though they are frequently opposed by airlines. Given the evidence, some public health experts argue that noise deserves to be treated with the same seriousness as air pollution.
Read the passage and summarise it in ONE sentence of no more than 75 words.
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Model answer: Evidence increasingly shows that chronic noise, by triggering stress responses and disturbing sleep, damages cardiovascular health and children's learning while falling hardest on poorer residents, so public health experts argue that it merits the same policy attention as air pollution.
Write Essay
Write an essay of about 200-300 words on the topic.
Some people predict that cash will disappear within the next few decades and that all payments will be made digitally. Would this be a positive or a negative development?
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Model answer: Card payments and mobile wallets are already so common in some countries that shops rarely see any banknotes. Although a cashless society offers convenience, I believe its disappearance would be a negative development if it happened completely.
The benefits are clear enough. Digital payments are fast and hygienic, and they reduce the costs of transporting and safeguarding cash. They also make transactions traceable, which can help to combat tax evasion and money laundering, and they allow customers to see an accurate record of their spending.
However, a society without cash would exclude some of its most vulnerable members. Elderly people, tourists, and those without bank accounts, such as some migrants and homeless people, may find it difficult or impossible to pay for basic goods. Cash also gives people privacy, since digital payments leave a permanent record that companies and governments could analyse. Perhaps most seriously, electronic systems are vulnerable to failure. A power cut, a cyber attack or a technical fault can leave a whole town unable to buy food, as has happened in several places.
For these reasons, I think that cash should be preserved as an alternative. Governments could require shops to accept notes and coins, ensure that everyone has access to basic banking, and invest in reliable digital infrastructure. A mixture of methods would give citizens both the convenience of technology and the security of choice.
Reading
Reading & Writing: Fill in the Blanks
Select the best word for each blank.
Bees are responsible for pollinating a large share of the crops that the global food supply. As they move from flower to flower in nectar, pollen grains stick to their bodies and are carried to the next bloom, allowing fertilisation to occur. Commercial beekeepers often hives across the country so that their colonies can pollinate crops that flower at different times of year. In recent decades, however, bee populations have sharply because of pesticide exposure, habitat loss and a parasitic mite. Because agriculture healthy bee populations, scientists warn that continued losses could threaten food security worldwide.
Multiple Choice, Choose Multiple Answers
Read the text and select all the correct answers.
Spider silk is renowned among materials scientists for combining exceptional strength with remarkable elasticity, a combination rarely found together in a single material. Weight for weight, certain types of spider silk are stronger than steel, yet the silk can also stretch considerably before breaking, absorbing energy in a way that brittle materials, however strong, generally cannot. Different spiders, and even a single spider, produce several distinct types of silk suited to different purposes: a tough structural silk used to build the supporting frame of a web, a stretchier silk designed to absorb the impact of trapped prey without tearing, and a sticky silk that ensnares insects attempting to escape. Researchers have long attempted to reproduce these properties artificially, since a manufactured equivalent could prove valuable for applications ranging from lightweight body armour to biodegradable medical stitches, but farming spiders at an industrial scale has proven impractical, partly because spiders are territorial and will often attack and eat one another if kept closely together. Some laboratories have instead turned to genetically modifying bacteria or goats to produce silk proteins, though matching the precise mechanical properties of natural spider silk remains a persistent scientific challenge.
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.
Facial recognition technology can identify individuals automatically by analysing distinctive features of their face captured in a photograph or video, a capability that has been for purposes ranging from unlocking smartphones to assisting police investigations. Supporters argue that the technology can help locate missing persons or identify suspects considerably more quickly than methods that rely entirely on human recognition and memory. Civil liberties advocates, however, warn that widespread use of facial recognition in public spaces could a level of continuous surveillance that would have been technically impossible only a few decades ago, raising serious concerns about privacy and the potential for abuse by both governments and private companies. Studies have also found that some facial recognition systems perform measurably less accurately when certain demographic groups, raising concerns that flawed technology could lead to wrongful identification or arrest disproportionately affecting those same groups. In response to these concerns, some cities and countries have introduced strict regulations or outright bans on the use of facial recognition by police, while others continue to its use, generally subject to certain specified conditions.
Multiple Choice, Choose Single Answer
Read the text and choose the best answer.
Social identity theory proposes that a significant part of a person's sense of self is derived not purely from individual characteristics but from the various social groups to which that person belongs, whether defined by nationality, profession, a shared hobby or countless other possible categories. According to the theory, individuals are naturally motivated to view the specific groups they personally belong to, referred to as in-groups, more favourably than groups they do not belong to, referred to as out-groups, a bias that can occur even when the groups in question are based on genuinely trivial or entirely arbitrary distinctions. In classic experiments demonstrating this effect, participants randomly and arbitrarily assigned to entirely meaningless groups nonetheless began favouring members of their own randomly assigned group over members of the other group, despite having no prior connection whatsoever to either group before the experiment began. Researchers argue that this tendency toward in-group favouritism likely evolved because group membership provided genuine practical survival advantages throughout much of human evolutionary history, even though the same underlying psychological tendency can, in a modern context, contribute to prejudice and unwarranted discrimination between entirely unrelated social or cultural groups today.
3. According to the passage, what did classic experiments on arbitrary group assignment demonstrate?
Listening
Summarize Spoken Text
Listen to the recording, then write a summary.
Transcript (available after checking)
Bike-sharing schemes now operate in hundreds of cities. The idea is simple: you unlock a bicycle from a docking station or with a phone app, ride to your destination and leave it there. The first large systems appeared in Europe around the two thousands, and Chinese cities later introduced dockless bikes that could be left anywhere. This caused problems, as thousands of bikes ended up piled on pavements or dumped in rivers. Cities responded by requiring operators to use designated parking zones and to limit the numbers of bikes. Evidence suggests that the schemes work best for short trips and for connecting people to trains and buses, rather than replacing car journeys entirely. To be successful, they also require safe cycling infrastructure. If riders feel unsafe among heavy traffic, they simply won't use the bikes, however cheap and convenient the scheme may be.
Write a summary of the lecture in 50–70 words.
Show sample answer
Model answer: Bike-sharing schemes let people rent bikes by app or docking station, but dockless versions caused clutter, so cities introduced parking zones and limits on fleet size. The schemes work best for short trips and connecting with public transport, and they depend on safe cycling infrastructure, without which people will not use them.
Multiple Choice, Choose Multiple Answers
Listen and select all the correct answers.
Transcript (available after checking)
Streaming has replaced sales of CDs and downloads as the main way most people listen to music, but the money it generates is distributed in a way that many artists consider unfair. Most services pay out from a shared pool based on total streams, meaning a listener's monthly fee doesn't go directly to the artists that particular person actually played; instead it's pooled and divided according to the platform's overall streaming shares. As a result, a small number of hugely popular artists receive a large share of the payouts, while musicians with modest but loyal audiences often earn fractions of a cent per stream. Some services have experimented with a user-centric model, where a subscriber's fee is split only among the artists they personally stream, which supporters argue would better reward niche or independent musicians, though critics note it would barely change most listeners' favourite artists' earnings.
1. Which of the following are stated in the lecture?
Fill in the Blanks
Listen to the recording and type the missing words.
Long before modern vaccines existed, people in parts of Asia noticed that surviving a mild case of smallpox gave lifelong protection, so they began exposing healthy people to material from patients. In seventeen ninety-six, an English doctor tested a safer idea: exposing a boy to cowpox, a much disease, and then to smallpox, which the boy never caught. His work gave us the word vaccine, from the Latin for . Global campaigns eventually eliminated smallpox by nineteen eighty, the only human disease ever this way.
Highlight Correct Summary
Listen and choose the paragraph that best summarises the recording.
Transcript (available after checking)
The Phoenicians, a seafaring trading civilisation based along the eastern Mediterranean coast, developed one of the earliest true alphabets around the eleventh century BCE, representing individual consonant sounds with simple symbols rather than the complex pictographs or hundreds of syllable signs used by earlier writing systems in the region. Because it was far simpler to learn than systems like Egyptian hieroglyphics or Mesopotamian cuneiform, Phoenician traders spread it efficiently across the Mediterranean as they established trading posts, and it was later adapted independently by the Greeks, who added symbols for vowel sounds the original Phoenician system had lacked. That Greek adaptation eventually influenced the Latin alphabet, which is why the alphabet used to write English today can be traced back, through several stages of borrowing and adaptation, to this original Phoenician system.
2. Which paragraph best summarises the recording?
Multiple Choice, Choose Single Answer
Listen and choose the best answer.
Transcript (available after checking)
The idea behind Velcro came from a Swiss engineer who, after a countryside walk in the nineteen forties, examined burrs stuck to his dog's fur under a microscope and noticed tiny hooks catching on fabric loops. He spent years testing materials before settling on nylon, woven into one strip covered in tiny hooks and a second covered in soft loops, together forming a strong yet easily separable fastener. Early versions were expensive and considered impractical for everyday clothing, and Velcro only became widely known after NASA used it to secure loose objects for astronauts during missions in the nineteen sixties.
3. What inspired the Swiss engineer to invent Velcro?
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. Early mechanical pedometers, designed to count a wearer's footsteps, used a tiny weighted lever that gently swung with each step, gradually advancing a set of internal gears connected to a numbered dial. Although notably less accurate than modern electronic sensors, these purely mechanical devices required no power at all, and some historical accounts credit an creative eighteenth-century figure with an early design.
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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