PTE Academic Mastery: Multiple-Choice, Choose Single Answer (Reading)

Multiple-Choice, Choose Single Answer (Reading) questions assess reading skills. It requires you to read, analyze, understand, and assess a short text on an academic subject and choose a single correct response.

Number of items 2-3
Prompt Length Text up to 110 words
Scoring Correct/Incorrect
Communicative skills, enabling skills and other traits scored Reading
Subskills tested Reading: Any of the following depending on the task; identifying the topic, theme or main ideas; identifying the relationships between sentences and paragraphs; evaluating the quality and usefulness of texts; identifying a writer’s purpose, style, tone or attitude; identifying supporting points or examples; reading for overall organization and connections between pieces of information; reading for information to infer meanings or find relationships; identifying specific details, facts, opinions, definitions or sequences of events; inferring the meaning of unfamiliar words.
Strategies
  1. Ensure you read the question or prompt. Sometimes, when we ignore this, we tend to look for the correct answer. You will lose points if the task is asking for the incorrect option.
  2. If you cannot find the answer because too many unfamiliar words, try to infer the subject matter of the text using the words that you know. Do not waste time trying to understand every single word.
  3. Bear in mind that the options may not contain the exact words found in the text. Choices can be synonyms, so broaden your comprehension.
  4. Try elimination. One by one, check if each option is correct or incorrect by comparing them to the facts stated in the text.
  5. Do not spend too much time on one task item. There is no time limitation defined for each task in the Reading section. Remeber that this section must be completed within 32-41 minutes.

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