PTE Academic · full test
PTE Academic reading practice set 7
Fourteen harder PTE Academic reading questions on cognitive dissonance, the Little Ice Age, language and thought, falsifiability, kin selection, the gold standard, deep time in geology, anchoring, groundwater, medieval guilds, lake ecology, the replication crisis, linear perspective and public goods. The set covers Reading and Writing Fill in the Blanks (drop-down gaps) and Re-order Paragraphs, with longer passages and closer choices than set 5. It is untimed; the real Reading part is timed and scored from 10 to 90. Here each drop-down gap earns its own point, as on the real test, but a re-order item scores only when the whole order is right, whereas the real test gives partial credit.
Exam mode: timed, answers at the end, like the real test. Practice mode: untimed, the answer and explanation after each question.
What is in this test
Covers: reading writing fill in blanks (7) · reorder paragraphs (7)
A sample question
The text boxes below are in a random order. Restore the original order of the text.
- Psychologists call this tendency anchoring, and it appears in settings from quizzes to house valuations.
- The effect is striking precisely because no one is deceived; people simply fail to adjust far enough from the starting point.
- In one classic design, participants first consider whether a quantity is higher or lower than an arbitrary figure, and only then give their own estimate.
- When people estimate an unknown quantity, their answers are often pulled towards a number they have just seen, even an irrelevant one.
- Those shown a high figure typically give much larger estimates than those shown a low one, although both groups know the figure was chosen at random.
Marked when you take the test; the explanation appears in your review.