PTE ACADEMIC READING RE ORDER SAMPLE PRACTICE 9
A. “A farmer’s pride is his horse; his cow may be thin but his horse must be fat,” went a Slovak saying.
B. Fine horses bespoke the nobility the party was supposed to despise.
C. Communist leaders, when they visited villages, preferred to see cows and pigs.
D. Although a working horse was just about tolerable, the communists were right to be wary.
E. Peasants from Poland to the Hungarian Pustza preferred their horses to party dogma.
F. Horses and communism were, on the whole, a poor match.
A. At times, the intended humour may simply not come off.
B. Making people laugh while trying to sell them something is a tougher challenge, since the commercial can fall flat on two grounds.
C. There are indications that in substituting the hard sell for a more entertaining approach, some agencies have rather thrown out the baby with the bath water.
D. There are many advertisements which do amuse but do not even begin to set the cash tills ringing.
E. Making people laugh is tricky.
F. Again, it is rarely sufficient for an advertiser simply to amuse the target audience in order to reap the sales benefit.
A. Picture a termite colony, occupying a tall mud hump on an African plain.
B. Hungry predators often invade the colony and unsettle the balance.
C. The colony flourishes only if the proportion of soldiers to workers remains roughly the same, so that the queen and workers can be protected by the soldiers, and the queen and soldiers can be serviced by the workers.
D. But its fortunes are presently restored, because the immobile queen, walled in well below ground level, lays eggs not only in large enough numbers, but also in the varying proportions required.
E. The hump is alive with worker termites and soldier termites going about their distinct kinds of business.
F. How can we account for her mysterious ability to respond like this to events on the distant surface?
A. Her comprehension of language is therefore very high.
B. According to recent research, the critical period for developing language skills is between the ages of three and five and a half years.
C. The read-to child already has a large vocabulary and a sense of grammar and sentence structure.
D. Children who are read to in these years have a far better chance of reading well in school, indeed, of doing well in all their subjects.
E. And the reason is actually quite simple.
F. This correlation is far and away the highest yet found between home influences and school success.
A. With these, hunters could approach Belugas within hunting range and profit from its inner skin and blubber.
B. Belugas seem to have used their well-known sensitivity to noise to evolve an ‘avoidance’ strategy to outsmart hunters and their powerful technologies.
C. To escape an approaching motor, Belugas have learned to dive to the ocean bottom and stay there for up to 20 minutes, by which time the confused predator has left.
D. Today, however, even with much more powerful engines, it is difficult to come close, because the whales seem to disappear suddenly just when you thought you had them in your sights.
E. High-powered outboard motors were considered to be one of the major threats to the survival of the Beluga whales.
F. When the first outboard engines arrived in the early 1930s, one came across 4 and 8 HP motors.
A. Because they aim quickly to acquaint the student with what the contemporary scientific community thinks it knows, textbooks treat the various experiments, concepts, laws and theories of the current normal science as separately and as nearly seriatim as possible.
B. Those misconstructions render revolutions invisible; the arrangement of the still visible material in science texts implies a process that, if it existed, would deny revolutions a function.
C. The reconstruction of history by post-revolutionary science texts involves more than a multiplication of historical misconstructions.
D. Science has reached its present state by a series of individual discoveries and inventions that, when gathered together, constitute the modern body of technical knowledge.
E. But when combined with the generally unhistorical air of science writing and with the occasional systematic misconstruction, one impression is likely to follow.
F. As pedagogy this technique of presentation is unexceptionable.
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