Free PTE Academic mock 🇦🇺

7 original practice questions written by Myndaq in the PTE Academic style. They are not taken from this mock paper or from official past papers. Try each one, then open the answer.

1. Question 1ReadingOne correct answer

   Salt marshes occupy a narrow band between the tide line and dry land, and for most of the twentieth century they were valued chiefly as ground waiting to be drained. That valuation has been revised. Marsh sediment takes in organic carbon at rates that, hectare for hectare, outpace those of mature tropical forest, and because the sediment stays waterlogged the carbon decays slowly and is buried rather than breathed back out.

   The revision matters most for the arithmetic. A drained marsh does not merely stop storing carbon; the exposed sediment oxidises and gives back what it has held, in some places for centuries. Restoration schemes therefore claim two benefits at once, renewed burial and avoided release, and it is the second of these, much the harder to observe directly, that produces the larger figure on paper.

   Which of the following best states the writer's main point about restoring salt marshes?

   1. A. Restored marshes take in carbon more quickly per hectare than mature tropical forest does.
   2. B. Most of the climate value claimed for restoration comes from emissions prevented rather than from carbon newly buried.
   3. C. Marshes were drained in the twentieth century because their capacity to store carbon had not yet been measured.
   4. D. Waterlogged sediment stops organic material from decaying at all.
   Show answer and explanation

   Answer: B

   The second paragraph sets the two claimed benefits side by side and says plainly that the avoided release, not the renewed burial, gives the larger figure. That is the writer's point about restoration, so option B is the key.

   Option A repeats a comparison from the first paragraph, but that is background about marshes in general, not the point being made about restoration. Option C invents a cause: the text says the marshes were seen as land waiting to be drained, not why the carbon went unmeasured. Option D overstates the text, which says decay is slow, not absent.

2. Question 2ReadingOne or more correct answers

   When a pair of beavers was released into the upper reaches of a small upland catchment, the stated aim was modest: to find out whether the animals would last a winter there. Within four years they had built eleven dams along a two-kilometre stretch, and the monitoring programme had been rewritten around questions nobody had planned to ask.

   The dams slowed the water. Peak flows measured at the foot of the stretch fell by roughly a third in heavy rain, while the ponds behind the dams held water through two dry summers that left comparable streams nearby reduced to strings of standing pools. Silt settled out in the ponds, so the water leaving the stretch carried less of it. Not every outcome pleased everyone: two fields of improved pasture became waterlogged, and the farmer who owned them was compensated only after a long argument about whether the flooding counted as damage.

   According to the text, which of the following followed from the beavers' activity in the catchment?

   1. A. Peak flows at the bottom of the stretch were lower during heavy rain.
   2. B. Water was held in the ponds through two dry summers.
   3. C. The water leaving the stretch carried less silt than before.
   4. D. Comparable streams nearby were dammed by the same pair of animals.
   5. E. The farmer whose fields flooded was compensated without delay.
   Show answer and explanation

   Answer: A, B, C

   The second paragraph states each of the first three outcomes directly: peak flows fell by about a third, the ponds held water through two dry summers, and silt settled out so that less of it left the stretch.

   Option D misreads the comparison. The nearby streams are mentioned only as a contrast, to show what happened where there were no dams. Option E contradicts the final sentence, which says compensation came only after a long argument.

3. Question 3ReadingOne correct answer

   Read the sentence and choose the word that best fills the blank. Although the survey covered only three districts, its findings have been widely ________ to the region as a whole, a step the authors themselves call premature.

   1. A. gathered
   2. B. generalised
   3. C. magnified
   4. D. estimated
   Show answer and explanation

   Answer: B

   The sentence describes applying a narrow finding to a wider area, which is exactly what 'generalised to' means, and the authors' word 'premature' confirms that an unwarranted extension is meant.

   'Gathered' would describe collecting the data, not extending a conclusion, and does not take 'to' in this sense. 'Magnified' suggests exaggerating the size of a result rather than widening its scope. 'Estimated' would need a quantity as its object and leaves the phrase 'to the region' unattached.

4. Question 4ReadingOne correct answer

   Read the sentence and choose the word that best fills the blank. Rainwater harvesting is cheap to install, but in districts where the year's rain arrives in a few violent storms the tanks fill and overflow within days, so the method ________ far less water over twelve months than its advocates assume.

   1. A. yields
   2. B. absorbs
   3. C. spends
   4. D. records
   Show answer and explanation

   Answer: A

   The blank needs a verb meaning that the method produces or supplies a quantity of usable water, and 'yields far less water' is the natural collocation in that sense.

   'Absorbs' would make the method the receiver rather than the source, which reverses the logic of the sentence. 'Spends' implies using up water that the method is meant to provide. 'Records' would describe measuring the water, which is not what the overflowing tanks are said to affect.

5. Question 5ReadingOne correct answer

   The four sentences below come from a single paragraph but are printed out of order.

   1. The upshot was that a traveller could step off a train and find the town hall clock a quarter of an hour behind the one on the platform, a gap that lasted for nearly a decade.

   2. Before the railways, every town set its clocks by the sun, so that a clock in the west of the country ran visibly behind one in the east.

   3. The companies therefore imposed one standard time along their lines, printed it in the timetables and set the station clocks to it.

   4. Municipal authorities, though, were under no obligation to adopt it, and many kept the older local reckoning on the town hall.

   Which order restores the original paragraph?

   1. A. 2 - 3 - 4 - 1
   2. B. 2 - 4 - 3 - 1
   3. C. 3 - 2 - 4 - 1
   4. D. 1 - 2 - 3 - 4
   5. E. 4 - 3 - 2 - 1
   Show answer and explanation

   Answer: A

   Sentence 2 is the only one that can open, because it introduces the situation without referring back to anything. Sentence 3 begins 'therefore' and presents the railway companies' response to the problem just described, so it must follow 2. Sentence 4 turns on 'though' and its pronoun 'it' refers to the standard time introduced in 3, so 4 comes next. Sentence 1 starts 'The upshot', summarising the clash between station time and town hall time, so it closes.

   The other orders all break a reference: putting 4 before 3 leaves 'it' with nothing to point to, starting with 3 leaves 'therefore' unexplained, and starting with 1 puts the consequence before its cause.

6. Question 6ReadingOne correct answer

   Peer review is often described as the mechanism that keeps error out of the scientific record. Reviewers, on this account, act as gatekeepers: they read a submitted paper closely, work out what is wrong with it, and either demand repairs or refuse it entry.

   Editors who have watched the process from the inside tend to describe something narrower. A reviewer reads a text, not a laboratory; what reaches them is the set of numbers an author chose to report, arranged as the author chose to arrange them. Review reliably catches incoherence, a conclusion the figures cannot support or a method described too vaguely to repeat. What it cannot catch is a study that is internally tidy and externally false. To treat review as a filter for truth is therefore to ask of it a service it was never built to perform.

   The writer suggests that the central limitation of peer review is that it

   1. A. depends on reviewers who lack the expertise to judge specialist work
   2. B. can examine only the written account of a study, not the study itself
   3. C. turns away too many papers that later turn out to be sound
   4. D. moves too slowly to cope with the number of submissions
   Show answer and explanation

   Answer: B

   The second paragraph makes the point twice: a reviewer reads a text rather than a laboratory, and sees only what the author chose to report. That is why a neat but false study can pass, so option B states the limitation the writer is arguing for.

   Option A blames the reviewers' competence, which the passage never questions. Options C and D raise familiar complaints about rejection rates and delay, neither of which the passage mentions at all.

7. Question 7ReadingOne or more correct answers

   City tree-planting programmes are usually announced with a number: so many thousand saplings in the ground by a given year. Survival is reported far less often. Across a review of eleven municipal schemes, between a fifth and a half of young street trees were dead inside five years, and the losses clustered in the first two summers.

   The causes were seldom exotic. Saplings put into compacted subsoil had almost no rooting volume. Those planted in autumn and then left unwatered through a dry spring died of thirst within a few metres of a working hydrant. Where a scheme paid its contractor for each tree planted rather than for each tree alive three years later, mortality ran consistently higher. The schemes with the best survival rates were not the ones with the largest budgets but the ones that had written watering into somebody's job description.

   According to the text, which of the following contributed to the deaths of young street trees?

   1. A. Compacted subsoil that left the roots almost no room
   2. B. An absence of watering through a dry spring after planting
   3. C. Contracts that paid for trees planted rather than for trees still alive
   4. D. Unusually severe winters in the years following planting
   5. E. Planting sites located far from any water supply
   6. F. The choice of species poorly suited to the local climate
   Show answer and explanation

   Answer: A, B, C

   The second paragraph names all three: no rooting volume in compacted subsoil, death from thirst after an unwatered dry spring, and higher mortality where payment was per tree planted instead of per tree surviving.

   Option D is wrong because the losses are said to cluster in the first two summers, and winters are never mentioned. Option E contradicts the text, which places the dead saplings within a few metres of a working hydrant, so distance from water was not the problem. Option F is not raised anywhere; the text says the causes were seldom exotic and lists management failures instead.