Sample Questions samples for PTE Summarize Written Text - 3 | Speaking & Writing Section for PTE PDF Download

Q1: Read and summarize written text in your words.
The English have the reputation of being a nation of tea drinkers, but this wasn’t always the case. By the end of the 17th century, the English were the biggest coffee drinkers in the Western world, and coffee houses became the places to be seen. For gossip also, one could pick up talk of the latest intellectual developments in the field of science, politics, and so on, in this age of scientific discovery and research. Coffee houses were very simple and basic at first; one can say a room with a bar at one corner and a few plain tables and chairs at the other end. Customers paid a penny for a bowl – not a cup – of coffee. At that time, it was thought that the customers didn’t use bad language just because of the presence of a polite young woman. An added attraction was that coffee houses provided free newspapers and journals.

But people didn’t go to the coffee houses just to drink coffee. They went to talk. Simple cafes were converted and developed into clubs, where one with a penny could go for a drink and a chat. Most of them started to go to coffee houses to find other people with the same job or of same interest to talk and conduct business.

The great popularity of coffee houses lasted about a 100 years. In the later 18th century, increased trade with other countries made such luxuries as coffee cheaper and more easily available to the ordinary person. As a result, people started to drink it at home. At that time more tea was imported from abroad. The domestic tea-party replaced the century of the coffee house as the typical English social occasion.

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Q2: Read and summarize written text in your words.
The system of Crop Intensification is a climate-smart, agro-ecological methodology for increasing the productivity of crops and more recently other crops by changing the management of plants, soil, water, and nutrients.

SCI methodology is based on four main principles that interact with each other. Early, quick and healthy plant establishment; Reduced plant density; Improved soil conditions through enrichment with organic matter; Reduced and controlled water application. Based on these principles, farmers can adapt recommended SCI practices to respond to their agro-ecological and socio-economic conditions. Adaptations are often undertaken to accommodate changing weather patterns, soil conditions, labor availability, water control, access to organic inputs, and the decision whether to practice fully organic agriculture or not. In addition, the SCI principles have been applied to feed rice and to other crops, such as wheat, sugarcane, pulses, showing increased productivity over current conventional planting practices.

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Q3: Read and summarize written text in your words.
Elderly people are growing healthier, happier and more independent, say American scientists. The results of a 14-year study to be announced later this month reveal that the diseases associated with old age are afflicting fewer and fewer people and when they do strike, it is much later in life.

Researchers, now analyzing the results of data gathered in 1994, say arthritis, high blood pressure and circulation problems-the major medical complaints in this age group-are troubling a smaller proportion every year. And the data confirms that the rate at which these diseases are declining continues to accelerate. Other diseases of old-age dementia, stroke, arteriosclerosis, and emphysema-are also troubling fewer and fewer people.

‘It really raises the question of what should be considered normal aging,’ says Kenneth Manton, a demographer from Duke University in North Carolina. He says that the problems doctors accepted as normal in a 65-year-old in 1982 are often not appearing until people are 70 or 75, clearly, certain diseases are beating a retreat in the face of medical advances. But there may be other contributing factors. Improvements in childhood nutrition in the first quarter of the twentieth century, for example, gave today’s elderly people better start in life than their predecessors.

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Q4: Read and summarize written text in your words.
Educational technology is defined by the Association for Educational Communications and Technology as “The study and ethical practice of facilitating learning and improving performance by creating, using, and managing appropriate technological processes and resources.” Educational technology refers to the use of both physical hardware and educational theoretic. It encompasses several domains, including learning theory, computer-based training, online learning, and, where mobile technologies are used, m-learning. Accordingly, there are several discrete aspects to describing the intellectual and technical development of educational technology.
* educational technology as the theory and practice of educational approaches to learning.
* educational technology as technological tools and media that assist in the communication of knowledge, and its development and exchange.
* educational technology for learning management systems (LMS), such as tools for student and curriculum management, and education management information systems (EMIS).
* educational technology itself as an educational subject; such courses may be called “Computer Studies” or “Information and communications technology (ICT)”.

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Q5: Read and summarize written text in your words.
It’ll Never Fly: The City Of London
Who would have thought back in 1698, as they downed their espressos, that the little band of stockbrokers from Jonathan’s Coffee House in Change Alley EC3 would be the founder- members of what would become the world’s mighty money capital?
Progress was not entirely smooth. The South Sea Bubble burst in 1720 and the coffee house exchanges burned down in 1748. As late as Big Bang in 1986, when bowler hats were finally hung up, you wouldn’t have bet the farm on London surpassing New York, Frankfurt, and Tokyo as Mammon’s international nexus. Yet the 325,000 souls who operate in the UK capital’s financial hub have now overtaken their New York rivals in the size of the funds managed (including offshore business); they hold 70% of the global secondary bond market and the City dominates foreign exchange trading. And its institutions paid out £9 billion in bonuses in December. The Square Mile has now spread both eastwards from EC3 to Canary Wharf and westwards into Mayfair, where many of the private-equity ‘locusts’ and their hedge-fund pals now hang out. For foreigners in finance, London is the place to be. It has no Sarbanes-Oxley and no euro to hold it back, yet the fact that it still flies so high is against the odds. London is one of the most expensive cities in the world to live in, transport systems groan and there’s an ever-present threat of terrorist attack. But, for the time being, the deals just keep on getting bigger.

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