Multiple Choice, Multiple Answers Practice Questions

About Multiple Choice, Multiple Answers

Multiple Choice, Multiple Answers plays a recording once and asks you to select every option it supports — more than one answer is correct. Selecting an unsupported option costs you a point, so this task rewards precise listening over broad keyword matching.

Exam

PTE Academic and PTE Core

Scoring

Negative marking: wrong selections lose points

Listening Multiple Choice, Multiple Answers plays a recording once and asks you to select every option it actually supports, with more than one correct answer possible and no indication of how many. Selecting a wrong option costs you a point, which makes precise listening more valuable than broad keyword recognition. This guide covers the format, the scoring, and a worked example built from a short original recording script.

What Listening Multiple Choice, Multiple Answers is

This task plays an audio recording once, after which you see a question and a list of options. You select every option the recording supports; unlike a standard multiple-choice question, more than one option can be correct, and the number of correct options is not revealed.

Because a wrong selection is penalised, the task rewards a specific kind of listening discipline: treating each option as its own claim to verify against what you actually heard, rather than selecting anything that sounds broadly consistent with the recording's topic.

Format and timing

The recording is noticeably longer on PTE Academic than on PTE Core, while the item count is slightly higher on Academic as well.

Pearson's Academic page states a seven-second pause before the recording begins. There is no separate answer timer for this task; you work within the Listening section's shared clock, which runs about 31-39 minutes on PTE Academic and about 22-37 minutes on PTE Core.

How it is scored

Each option is scored individually: a correct selection adds one point, an incorrect selection subtracts one point, and the item's total score cannot fall below zero. This is the same negative-marking rule used by the Reading version of Multiple Choice, Multiple Answers.

The practical consequence is that selecting extra options for safety is never a neutral move — it either adds a point, if the option is genuinely correct, or removes one, if it is not. A candidate who selects only the options they can justify with specific evidence from the recording will usually outscore one who selects broadly.

Step-by-step method

The method below works in a fixed order: read during the pre-audio pause, listen once for meaning, then judge every option on its own evidence.

• Use the pause before the recording starts to read the question and the options once, so you know what to listen for.
• Listen to the whole recording for its overall meaning first, taking brief notes on points that seem to relate to the options.
• After the recording ends, go through each option individually and ask whether the recording specifically supports it, rather than whether it feels generally consistent with the topic.
• Be alert for an option that repeats vocabulary from the recording but attaches it to a different claim than the one actually made.
• Leave any option unselected if you cannot recall specific support for it, rather than including it in case it happens to be correct.
• Do a final check of your selections against your notes before moving to the next item.
• If two options seem to make the same point in different words, check whether the recording actually supports both, or only one, since near-duplicate options are worth checking one by one rather than accepting as a pair.

Worked example

Example (written by LexiPTE). This recording script and question are an original exercise, not a real exam item, built to show how to evaluate each option.

Recording script: "A recent survey of remote workers found that most reported feeling more productive at home, though nearly half also said they missed spontaneous conversations with colleagues. Interestingly, workers who split their week between home and the office reported the highest overall satisfaction, suggesting that a hybrid arrangement may address both concerns better than either extreme."

Question: According to the survey, which of the following are true? Options: (A) Most remote workers felt less productive at home. (B) Many remote workers missed spontaneous conversations with colleagues. (C) Workers with a hybrid schedule reported the highest satisfaction. (D) The survey recommends that all companies adopt hybrid schedules.

The correct selections are B and C. Option B restates the finding that nearly half of workers missed spontaneous conversations. Option C restates the finding about hybrid workers reporting the highest overall satisfaction.

Option A is wrong because it reverses the actual finding — most workers reported feeling more productive, not less. Option D overstates the recording, which only suggests hybrid arrangements may help, without recommending that every company adopt one. Both wrong options reuse the recording's vocabulary while changing or exaggerating its actual claim, which is the pattern to watch for in this task.

Notice also what the correct answer does not do: neither B nor C tries to combine two findings into one sweeping claim, the way option D does. A reliable way to check a borderline option is to ask whether it stays as narrow and specific as the recording's own wording, or whether it has quietly widened the claim into something broader and easier to agree with in the abstract.

Strategies that work

These strategies are practice advice rather than official rules. Each one aims to make every selection defensible, because under negative marking an unsupported selection is the costliest error you can make.

• Use the pre-audio pause fully — reading the options before you listen tells you exactly what to listen for during a single playback.
• Take notes on claims, not just topic words, since two options can share vocabulary while making opposite claims.
• Treat words like "recommends", "all" or "proves" in an option as a signal to check whether the recording actually goes that far.
• When uncertain about a specific option, default to leaving it unselected rather than including it, since an unsupported selection actively costs a point.

Common mistakes

The mistakes below share one cause: selecting on familiarity with the wording rather than on evidence from what the speaker actually claimed.

• Selecting an option because it repeats words heard in the recording, without checking whether it repeats the claim accurately.
• Selecting too many options to be thorough, which increases the risk of losing points to negative marking.
• Missing the pre-audio pause and starting to listen for the answer before knowing what the question is asking.
• Confusing a reversed claim, such as "less productive" instead of "more productive", with the recording's actual statement.

Practice plan

Short, regular sessions suit this task better than occasional long ones, because the habit you are building is checking each option against specific evidence every time.

• Practise with recordings that include one clearly reversed distractor and one clearly overstated distractor, so you learn to recognise both patterns quickly.
• Track your ratio of correct to incorrect selections across practice sets, since that ratio — not just raw accuracy — is what the scoring actually rewards.
• Practise using the pre-audio pause deliberately: read every option in that window until it becomes an automatic habit rather than something you have to remember to do.
• Mix this task with Reading Multiple Choice, Multiple Answers in the same practice session, since the evidence-based elimination skill transfers directly between the two.
• Once short recordings feel comfortable, move on to the longest recordings your exam uses, so a fuller playback does not make note-taking feel unfamiliar on test day.