PTE Practice Test 1: Reading

In the real test each gap is a dropdown list. Here the choices are printed under each passage. Choose one word for each gap.

Passage A

The first public parks in industrial cities were not built for pleasure. They were built because physicians argued that crowded districts needed open ground, and that without it disease would (R1) ________ unchecked. The argument was (R2) ________ on little evidence, but it happened to be right for reasons nobody yet understood. A century later, when the mechanism of infection was finally clear, the parks that had been built on a mistaken theory turned out to be (R3) ________ anyway.

• R1 - spread / spend / spare / sprawl
• R2 - raised / based / placed / laid
• R3 - beneficial / artificial / superficial / substantial

Passage B

Sleep researchers once assumed that the brain simply slowed down at night. The opposite is nearer the truth. During certain stages the brain is almost as active as it is when awake, and this activity appears to be (R4) ________ to forming long-term memory. Students who revise and then sleep remember more than those who revise for the same number of hours and (R5) ________ sleep, which suggests that the hours before an examination may be better spent in bed than at a desk.

• R4 - essential / eventual / accidental / confidential
• R5 - forgo / forget / forbid / forecast

More than one answer is correct. In the real test a wrong choice cancels out a right one, so guessing everything scores nothing - choose only what you can defend.

Cartography has never been a neutral record of the world. A map must leave almost everything out, and what it keeps reveals who paid for it. Admiralty charts of the nineteenth century show coastlines, depths and harbours in fine detail while the land behind them is often blank, because a navy needed to arrive and did not need to know what lay inland. Maps made for tax collectors show field boundaries and almost no topography. Neither is dishonest. Each is simply shaped by the question it was made to answer, and a reader who forgets this will mistake an absence of information for an absence of anything there.

R6. Which of the following are supported by the passage?

• A - Maps are selective because no map can include everything.
• B - Admiralty charts left the interior blank because surveyors could not reach it.
• C - The purpose of a map influences what it shows.
• D - Tax maps and naval charts were both deliberately misleading.
• E - A blank area on a map does not necessarily mean empty ground.

The sentences are in the wrong order. Put them back into a single logical paragraph and write the letters in order.

R7

• A - The result was that a single bad harvest could empty a village that had stood for centuries.
• B - For most of history, the food a community ate was the food grown within a few miles of it.
• C - Railways changed this within a generation, by making it cheaper to move grain than to store it.
• D - That meant a failure in one field was a shortage in one kitchen, and a failure across a district was a famine.
• E - Since then, distance has mattered less to the price of bread than weather on the other side of the world.

R8

• A - Only later did anyone ask whether the birds were doing something more than decorating the hedge.
• B - Early naturalists recorded birdsong carefully but treated it as ornament.
• C - The answer, once the question was properly asked, was that song is mostly territory and courtship.
• D - It was described in musical notation, compared with human melody, and admired.
• E - What it was for seemed either obvious or not worth asking.

In the real test you drag words from a bank into the gaps. There are more words than gaps, and each word is used once at most.

Glass recycling is often held up as the simplest kind of recycling, and in chemistry it very nearly is: glass can be melted and reformed indefinitely without (R9) ________ in quality. The difficulty is not chemical but practical. Colours cannot easily be (R10) ________ once mixed, and a single piece of heat-resistant cookware in a load can (R11) ________ an entire batch, because it melts at a different temperature. Collection systems that keep colours apart therefore (R12) ________ far more usable material than those that do not, which is why the apparently fussy business of sorting bottles by colour is (R13) ________ rather than ceremonial.

Word bank: separated, loss, ruin, yield, practical, gather, decline, combined

One answer only.

When a language loses its last fluent speaker, what disappears is not only vocabulary. Languages differ in what they oblige a speaker to specify. Some require a verb to mark whether the speaker saw an event, inferred it, or was told about it, so that a sentence cannot be uttered without declaring the source of the knowledge in it. A speaker of such a language has spent a lifetime making that distinction automatically. The distinction itself survives translation perfectly well - any language can express it with enough words - but the obligation to make it does not, and it is the obligation, not the vocabulary, that is hardest to recover once the last speaker has gone.

R14. What does the writer identify as the greatest loss?

• A - Words that have no equivalent in other languages.
• B - The requirement to mark certain distinctions in every sentence.
• C - The ability to translate between unrelated languages.
• D - Knowledge about events that only one community witnessed.