Fill in the Blanks Practice Questions

About Fill in the Blanks

Fill in the Blanks plays a recording once while you read along a transcript with several words missing. You type each missing word exactly as you hear it — correct spelling is required for credit, so this task combines listening accuracy with careful transcription.

Exam

PTE Academic and PTE Core

Scoring

Each blank scored independently; spelling must be exact

Listening Fill in the Blanks plays a recording once while you read along a transcript with several words missing. You type each missing word exactly as you hear it, and correct spelling is required to earn credit — this task combines close listening with careful transcription under time pressure. This guide covers the format, the per-word scoring, and a worked example built from an original recording script.

What Listening Fill in the Blanks is

Listening Fill in the Blanks shows you a transcript with several gaps while a recording plays once. As you listen, you type the word you hear into each gap, working from the visible transcript rather than from memory of the whole passage.

The task rewards two separate skills at once: predicting a missing word's likely grammatical form from the surrounding transcript, and then catching that exact word inside continuous, natural-paced speech. A word you can spell perfectly is worth nothing if you mishear which word was actually said, and a word you hear correctly is worth nothing if you misspell it. Because the visible transcript already gives you the grammar and meaning around each gap, this task is often less about pure listening speed and more about matching a specific sound to a specific written word.

Format and timing

The recording length and item count are the same on both exams, but which of your scores the task feeds into is not: the PTE Academic Score Guide counts it toward Listening, while PTE Core counts it toward both Listening and Writing.

Pearson's Academic page states a seven-second pause before the recording begins; the Core page does not state this figure, so treat it as confirmed for Academic only. There is no separate answer timer beyond the Listening section's shared clock.

How it is scored

Scoring is additive: you earn one point for each blank you fill with the correct word, spelled correctly, and there is no negative marking for a wrong or misspelled word beyond simply not earning that point. An item with four gaps can score anywhere from zero to four.

Because spelling is part of the requirement, a word you clearly identify but spell incorrectly does not earn credit. Each gap is judged on its own, so a mistake in one blank never costs you the points you earned in the others.

Step-by-step method

• Read the visible transcript before the recording starts, if a pause is given, and predict roughly what kind of word — noun, verb, adjective, connector — each gap is likely to need.
• Follow along with the transcript as the recording plays, keeping your attention on the gaps rather than trying to process the whole passage equally.
• Type the word you hear as soon as you hear it, rather than waiting until the recording ends and trying to recall it from memory.
• If you miss one gap, do not dwell on it — keep following the transcript so you do not also miss the next one.
• After the recording ends, quickly reread your typed words against the surrounding sentence for grammatical sense.
• Check spelling last, once you are confident you captured the right word, since a correct word with one letter wrong still fails to score.

Worked example

Example (written by LexiPTE). This transcript is an original exercise, not a real exam item, built to show how anticipation and listening work together.

Transcript shown to the candidate: "The committee will [1] its final report next month, after [2] feedback from every regional office."

Recording (what is actually said): "The committee will publish its final report next month, after reviewing feedback from every regional office."

Before listening, gap 1 is predictable as a base-form verb after the modal "will", and gap 2 is predictable as an -ing form following "after". Hearing "publish" and "reviewing" confirms both expectations and gives the exact words to type.

A candidate who typed "publish" but wrote "pubish" would score zero on that gap despite hearing it correctly, since the scoring requires correct spelling as well as the correct word. This is why the final check in the step-by-step method — rereading specifically for spelling — is worth the extra few seconds it takes.

It is also worth noticing what anticipation alone could not tell you here: nothing about the surrounding grammar reveals whether the missing verb is "publish", "release" or "issue" — all three are grammatically possible after "will". Only the audio itself resolves that choice, which is why anticipation narrows the task but never replaces listening to the actual recording.

Strategies that work

Most points in this task are won or lost in two places: the moment the speaker reaches a gap, and the final spelling check. The strategies below target those two moments rather than general listening practice.

• Use any reading time before the recording to predict the grammatical form each gap needs — this narrows what you are listening for before the audio even starts.
• Keep your eyes moving with the transcript rather than trying to hold the whole sentence in memory and write it afterwards.
• Build a personal list of words you consistently mishear or misspell — often academic vocabulary with silent letters or unusual spelling patterns — and drill those specifically.
• If you are unsure of a word's exact spelling, write your best attempt rather than leaving the gap blank, since a blank scores the same as an incorrect guess.

Common mistakes

• Writing a word that sounds plausible in the sentence but does not match what was actually said.
• Losing your place in the transcript after missing one gap, which then causes you to miss the next one as well.
• Making a minor spelling error on a word you clearly heard and understood correctly.
• Spending time trying to recall an earlier gap instead of continuing to follow the recording in real time.

Practice plan

• Start with untimed transcripts where you predict the part of speech for each gap before listening at all, to build the anticipation habit separately from the listening pressure.
• Move to full timed practice with the recording playing once only, matching the real task's single playback.
• Keep a spelling log of every word you get wrong purely on spelling, separate from words you mishear, since the fix for each problem is different.
• Practise this task alongside Write from Dictation, since both combine listening accuracy with exact spelling, and skills built for one transfer directly to the other.
• Revisit any recording you struggled with a second time after a break, without looking at the transcript first, to check whether the difficulty was the specific words or the pace of the speech in general.