For the PTE reading and writing Fill in the Blanks task, you will see text appearing on your screen with blanks or gaps in them. You must fill in those gaps with words that you think would fit the sentence appropriately. There will be a drop-down box that you need to choose the specific word from.
This task is part of the Reading and writing section of your PTE Academic test which scores you on both your reading and writing ability.
Strategies
A good strategy is to look out for grammar. The missing part of the sentence can be discovered very quickly if you just keep an eye out for the grammatical structure of the sentence along with the words that are adjacent to the blank. Verbs, nouns, adjectives and more forms of the English languages can be recognized based on the grammar of the sentence. For example, the sun is ‘shining’. Through the observation of tenses in the sentence, you can come to the conclusion that the blank should be a verb with ‘ing’, hence it’s shining.
Many times, the blank is part of a common idiom or phrase that you could encounter before in your normal life. If you do, then you can quickly finish it without thinking too much about it. For example, “he’s been on cloud nine all day”. Even if nine was not given, you would know the answer as it is a famous
Skimming the entire paragraph to get a grasp of the meaning can improve your chances of getting all the blanks correct. Skimming helps you discover the key idea of the passage. Then, when you look at the options given to you under each blank, you can pick them depending on what you understood from the passage, as long as the grammar fits the passage.
Scoring
Your ability to apply contextual and grammatical signals to find words that complete a reading text will be assessed in Reading & Writing: Fill in the Blanks. If you successfully fill in all of the blanks, you will obtain the highest possible score for this question type. Partial credit scoring is used if one or more blanks are wrongly filled.
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