Practise Highlight Incorrect Words for PTE Academic. Open a question and work on your response at your own pace.
PTE Core version of this page515 questions · PTE Academic
Highlight Incorrect Words shows a transcript of a recording where some written words differ from what is actually said. You click every word that does not match the audio. Wrong clicks cost you a point, so this task rewards continuous tracking over guessing.
Highlight Incorrect Words puts a written transcript on screen while a recording of the same passage plays, except the transcript has been quietly altered in a few places. You click each altered word as you hear the true version spoken. Because a wrong click costs you a point, the task rewards careful, continuous tracking over hopeful clicking. This guide covers the timing, the negative-marking rule, a worked example, and a method for staying aligned with a transcript in real time.
Highlight Incorrect Words is a Listening task that also affects your Reading score, since answering it depends on reading a transcript accurately as much as listening to the recording. You see a written transcript on screen and hear a recording of what is meant to be the same passage; some words in the transcript have been altered from what the speaker actually says, and you click each one you identify as different.
Academic tests include 2–3 items of this type, built from recordings of 15–50 seconds.
This task combines two distinct skills that are usually tested separately elsewhere in PTE Academic: reading a passage closely, as in the Reading section, and tracking continuous spoken audio in real time, as in most other Listening tasks. Neither skill alone is enough, since a fast reader who is not actually listening will miss genuine mismatches, and an attentive listener who loses their place in the transcript will click the wrong words even when their ears heard correctly.
You have 10 seconds before the recording starts to glance at the transcript on screen. The recording then plays once, 15–50 seconds long, while you follow the transcript and click any word you hear does not match it.
This task shares the Listening section's overall clock with seven other task types, so the 10 seconds of preparation is your only dedicated reading time; everything else happens while the audio plays. Because the recording is only 15–50 seconds long, the whole item is over quickly once it starts, which leaves little room to recover from losing your place partway through.
Highlight Incorrect Words uses partial credit with negative marking. Each word you correctly identify as different from the audio earns one point, but each word you click that actually matches the audio loses one point.
Your score for the item cannot go below zero, so an over-eager pass that clicks many words at random cannot leave you worse off than clicking none at all — but it can still cost you points you had already earned by cancelling them out with wrong clicks.
Because both correct and incorrect clicks carry equal weight, cautious, confident clicking outperforms broad guessing across the transcript. As a rule of thumb, a candidate who clicks only the words they are certain about usually keeps more points than one who clicks every word that feels slightly unfamiliar, since each unnecessary click can erase a point already earned elsewhere in the same item.
The steps below follow the order of an item: the 10-second preview, the single playback, and the moment the recording ends.
Example (written by LexiPTE). The on-screen transcript reads: "The museum's new wing was completed last spring after nearly three years of renovation work. Engineers reinforced the original foundation before installing the modern glass roof that now covers the main gallery."
The recording actually says: "The museum's new wing was completed last winter after nearly three years of renovation work. Engineers reinforced the original foundation before installing the modern steel roof that now covers the main gallery."
Correct clicks: "spring" (the recording says "winter") and "glass" (the recording says "steel"). Every other word in the transcript, including the numbers and technical terms that can feel tempting to doubt, matches the audio exactly and should not be clicked.
A candidate who clicks "nearly", "three" or "foundation" because those words felt uncertain while reading quickly would lose a point for each one, since none of them actually differs from the audio; the only genuine mismatches are the season named and the roofing material, both single-word changes buried inside otherwise identical sentences.
These are practice habits, not Pearson rules; the aim of each one is to keep your eyes and your ears on the same word.
Train transcript tracking separately from mismatch detection at first. Read a transcript aloud while a similar recording plays, without clicking anything, purely to build the habit of staying aligned word for word with continuous audio.
Once that feels comfortable, reintroduce the clicking step, and after each attempt review which mismatches you missed and which correct words you clicked by mistake — the two errors call for different fixes, so treat them separately when you review. Missed mismatches usually mean you need to slow your reading pace to match the audio more closely, while wrongly clicked words usually mean you need more confidence before committing to a click.
