Fill in the Blanks (Drag and Drop)

What does the drag-and-drop fill-in-the-blanks task look like?

A short passage has several gaps. Below it sits a shared word bank holding more words than there are gaps. You drag a word from the bank into a gap to fill it, the mechanic behind PTE Academic's own name for the task, Fill in the Blanks (Drag and Drop).

• Read the bank before you commit to a gap: The full bank is visible from the start, so scan every word in it once before dragging anything. A word you dismiss early can turn out to be the only correct fit for a later gap.
• Distractors exist by design: The word bank always holds more words than gaps, so some words are never used. Don't assume every word in the bank belongs somewhere.
• Gaps interact: A word that almost fits one gap can be the only word that fits another. Solve the clearest gaps first, then work outward to the harder ones.
• Passages are short: At up to 80 words, this is the shortest passage type in PTE Reading, so a single misread sentence can affect more than one gap.

Because the passage is short, there is little room for a slow start. Spend your first few seconds reading the whole passage and the whole word bank before you drag anything, rather than filling the first gap you reach and adjusting your understanding as you go.

How is this different from the dropdown fill-in-the-blanks task?

This task looks similar to Fill in the Blanks (Dropdown), Academic, Reading and Writing: Fill in the Blanks, Core but the two tasks work differently. This task uses a single shared word bank with distractors and scores Reading only, in both exams. The dropdown task gives every gap its own private menu and, in PTE Core, also scores Writing.

The shared word bank also changes how you should manage risk. In the dropdown task, an unused menu option is simply an option you didn't need. Here, an unused bank word can mean you filled an earlier gap with the wrong choice and need to revisit it before submitting.

How to solve drag-and-drop blanks step by step

• Scan the whole bank first: Read every word in the bank before filling any gap, so a later, better-fitting word doesn't surprise you after you've already committed an early guess.
• Fill the clearest gaps first: Start with gaps where only one word bank option makes grammatical sense. This narrows the bank for the remaining, harder gaps.
• Check collocation, not just meaning: Two words can share a meaning but not combine naturally with the surrounding words. Check the exact phrase, not just the general topic, see the four collocation patterns worth learning by heart.
• Reread the completed passage: Once every gap is filled, read the whole short passage again. At 80 words, a full reread takes only a few seconds and catches a gap that was filled in isolation.
• Reconsider a gap if a leftover word fits better: If you finish with an unused word that clearly fits a gap you already filled, swap it in. A better-fitting leftover word is a strong signal that your first choice for that gap was the distractor.

A worked drag-and-drop blanks example

The same check, look at the word directly before or after the gap and decide what part of speech belongs there, applies to every gap in the passage, not only this one. Repeating it consistently is faster than weighing the full meaning of each bank word from scratch every time.

How drag-and-drop blanks are scored

Fill in the Blanks (Drag and Drop) is marked gap by gap: each gap you complete with the correct word earns one point, each incorrect or empty gap earns zero, and nothing is subtracted for a wrong word. The rule is identical in both exams and identical to the dropdown task's own per-gap marking, covered in Fill in the Blanks (Dropdown), Academic, Reading and Writing: Fill in the Blanks, Core. The difference between the two tasks is never in how a gap is marked, it's in where the word comes from: a private menu there, one shared bank with distractors here. Listening's own Fill in the Blanks task shares the name but not the mechanic: you type each missing word from a recording's transcript as you listen, rather than dragging one from a word bank, a useful contrast if you practise both.

Because there is no penalty for a wrong word beyond that gap scoring zero, fill every gap before you submit, even one you are unsure about.

Because every gap is scored on its own, a mistake on one gap never removes credit from a gap you got right elsewhere in the same passage. That makes this a good task for practising under light time pressure: an incomplete attempt still banks the gaps you finished correctly.