Practise Highlight Correct Summary for PTE Academic. Open a question and work on your response at your own pace.
146 questions · PTE Academic
Highlight Correct Summary plays a recording once, then shows several written summaries. You choose the one that best matches the recording's main message — distractors often reuse accurate keywords while quietly changing the cause, scope or conclusion.
Highlight Correct Summary is a PTE Academic Listening task in which you hear a recording once, then read several written summaries and choose the one that matches it. This task counts toward your Reading score as well as your Listening score, since answering it well depends on careful reading of the options as much as accurate listening. This guide covers the format, the correct/incorrect scoring rule, an original worked example, and a focused practice method.
Highlight Correct Summary appears only in PTE Academic; it is not part of PTE Core. You listen to a recording once, then read several written summaries of it and select the single one that best captures what you heard.
Academic tests include 2–3 items of this type. Expect the wrong options to be convincing. In our experience, a typical distractor reuses vocabulary and details from the recording while quietly changing its emphasis, scope or conclusion, so recognising words is never enough on its own.
Because the task mixes a spoken prompt with written answer options, it sits at the boundary between the Listening and Reading sections in terms of the skills it actually exercises, even though it is delivered as a Listening item.
The recording lasts 30–90 seconds and plays once, with no option to hear it again. Pearson does not publish a separate reading window for the summary options that follow, so you manage that reading time yourself within the Listening section's overall pace.
This task shares the Listening section's clock with seven other task types, so time spent rereading summaries carefully here is time you will not have for a later item — plan your pace across the whole section, not just this task.
Highlight Correct Summary is scored as correct or incorrect: choosing the one summary that accurately reflects the recording earns the point, and choosing any other summary, or none, earns nothing.
There is no partial credit for a summary that captures part of the recording's meaning while missing or distorting the rest. A summary that is accurate about one detail but wrong about the recording's overall conclusion is simply wrong, on the same footing as a summary that misrepresents everything.
Because Pearson scores this task toward both Listening and Reading, a missed item costs you credit in both skills rather than one — a good reason to treat the reading step as seriously as the listening step.
Example (written by LexiPTE). A recording describes how a small coastal town rebuilt its economy after its main fishery declined sharply. The narrator explains that local authorities funded training for former fishing workers to move into marine tourism, and that within several years tourism revenue had replaced most of the town's lost fishing income. The recording adds that the town's overall population kept falling regardless, because younger residents continued to leave for better-paid work in larger cities.
Summary options: A) The town's fishing industry recovered fully once new training programmes began. B) The town replaced most of its lost fishing income through tourism, even though its population kept shrinking. C) Younger residents left the town because tourism jobs paid less than fishing had. D) The town's economy declined permanently after the fishery closed.
Correct answer: B. It reflects both parts of the recording's actual claim — income was largely replaced through tourism, and the population still declined — without adding or removing either half. Option A wrongly claims the fishing industry itself recovered, which the recording never states. Option C introduces a specific reason (lower tourism wages) that the recording does not give; it only says younger residents left for better-paid work elsewhere, not that tourism itself paid badly. Option D ignores the economic recovery the recording clearly describes.
Every strategy below serves one aim: comparing each option with the whole message of the recording, not with the words you happen to remember from it.
Because this task blends Listening and Reading, alternate between practising it purely as a listening drill and purely as a close-reading drill. After each attempt, write your own one-sentence summary of the recording before looking at any of the given options, then compare your version against the correct summary to see exactly which detail you added, dropped or changed.
Once that habit is solid, practise under time pressure by giving yourself a fixed, short window to read all the summary options after listening, so you build the speed needed to compare several written claims against your notes before the Listening section's clock runs out.
Review a batch of items together rather than one at a time, and for every wrong choice identify whether the error came from mishearing the recording or from misreading a summary's exact claim — the two failure modes call for different fixes, one for listening notes and one for closer reading of the options.
