PTE Multiple Choice, Single Answer: free practice questions

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1. Question 1

   On a summer afternoon, the centre of a large city can be several degrees warmer than the farmland around it. Roads, roofs and car parks soak up sunlight during the day and release it slowly at night, so the city never fully cools down. Planners have tried many fixes, from pale roofing paint to fountains, but one of the cheapest and longest-lasting is also the oldest: trees. A mature street tree shades the ground beneath it and releases water vapour through its leaves, which cools the air nearby. Neighbourhoods with thick tree cover are noticeably cooler than bare ones only a few streets away, and their residents use less electricity for air conditioning.

   Which statement best expresses the main idea of the passage?

   Trees are a cheap and lasting way to reduce the extra heat found in cities.Pale roofing paint is the most effective way to cool a city.Cities are warmer than farmland mainly because of air conditioning.Fountains release water vapour that cools the streets around them.

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2. Question 2

   When a honeybee finds a good patch of flowers, she returns to the hive and performs what scientists call the waggle dance. She runs in a straight line while shaking her body, then loops back and repeats the run. The angle of the straight run, measured from straight up on the vertical comb, tells other bees the direction of the flowers relative to the sun. The duration of the waggle run tells them how far away the food is: the longer the bee waggles, the greater the distance. Bees watching the dance cannot see it clearly in the dark hive, so they follow the dancer closely and feel the movement through their own bodies.

   According to the passage, how do other bees know how far away the flowers are?

   From the angle of the straight run on the combFrom the scent of the flowers carried on the dancerFrom how long the waggle run lastsFrom the number of loops the dancer makes

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3. Question 3

   Before printing reached England in the late fifteenth century, a single word could be spelled in several ways, sometimes within a single document. Scribes wrote as they spoke, and speech differed from region to region. Early printers did not set out to fix this. Many of them had trained abroad, and some added or removed letters simply to make a line fit neatly on the page. Yet as printed books spread, readers saw the same spellings again and again, and schoolteachers began to treat the printed form as the correct one. By the time the first large dictionaries appeared, much of the work of settling English spelling had already been done, though not by anyone who had planned it.

   What can be inferred from the passage about English spelling?

   Early printers worked hard to create one correct spelling for every word.It became more uniform largely as a side effect of printing, not by design.The first large dictionaries created most of the spelling rules.Scribes in different regions agreed on how to spell common words.

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4. Question 4

   In the 1970s, many hillsides in Nepal were losing their forests quickly as villagers cut wood for fuel and cleared land for farming. Control from distant government offices had done little to slow the loss. A different approach began in the following decades: forests were handed to local user groups, who wrote their own rules about when and how much wood could be taken. Members patrolled the forest themselves and shared the income from selling timber and grass. Studies of the programme have found that forest cover recovered in many districts where user groups were active. Researchers now often point to Nepal when they argue that local people can look after shared land better than distant managers.

   Why does the writer describe Nepal's community forests?

   To argue that farming should be banned on hillsidesTo explain how timber is sold in Nepal's citiesTo criticise villagers for cutting wood in the 1970sTo give an example of local people managing a shared resource well

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5. Question 5

   Sleep was once seen as a time when the brain simply switched off. Research over the last century has overturned that view. During deep sleep, the brain replays patterns of activity from the day, and these replays appear to strengthen new memories. In one common type of experiment, volunteers learn a list of word pairs in the evening. Those who then sleep normally recall more pairs the next morning than those kept awake through the night. The benefit is not only about rest: people who stay awake but lie quietly in a dark room often do better than those kept busy, though usually not as well as the sleepers. Sleep, it seems, does some work that rest alone cannot.

   In the passage, the word "overturned" is closest in meaning to:

   confirmedknocked overshown to be wrongmade more popular

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