Practise Select Missing Word for PTE Academic. Open a question and work on your response at your own pace.
PTE Core version of this page203 questions · PTE Academic
Select Missing Word plays a recording that cuts off before its final word or phrase, replaced by a beep. You choose the option that completes the speaker's meaning — this tests whether you followed the argument, not just the last few words before the beep.
Select Missing Word cuts a recording off mid-argument: a beep replaces the speaker's final word or phrase, and you choose the written option that fits where the speaker was heading. Because the task checks whether you followed the whole argument, not just its last few seconds, guessing from the beep alone rarely works. This guide covers the format, the scoring rule, a worked example, and a practice method built around anticipating an ending before seeing the choices.
Select Missing Word is a Listening task in both PTE Academic and PTE Core; this guide covers the Academic version specifically. You listen to a recording once, and instead of finishing naturally, it cuts off partway through its final word or short phrase, replaced by a beep.
You then choose, from a short list of written options (Pearson's Academic guidance mentions three to five), the one that completes the speaker's meaning. Academic tests include 1–2 items of this type.
The options are usually built to test whether you tracked the argument's direction: several may be grammatically fine continuations of the sentence, but only one actually matches what the speaker was leading toward.
This makes Select Missing Word different from most other Listening tasks, where the question is separate from the recording. Here, the recording itself is the question, and the beep marks the exact point where your understanding is tested, so there is no written prompt to fall back on if your attention drifted earlier in the passage.
The recording lasts 20–70 seconds and plays once, with the beep replacing the final word or short phrase near the very end. Pearson does not publish a separate pre-audio reading window for this task, so do not count on reading time before the audio starts; as a practical tip, keep your attention on the recording and turn to the written options once the beep has sounded.
As with the rest of the Listening section, this task shares its overall clock with seven other task types rather than running on a fixed timer of its own. Because the recordings are relatively short, at most 70 seconds, the demand this task places on your attention span is lower than longer Listening tasks, but the payoff for sustained attention across even a short recording is higher, since the whole item hinges on the final few words.
Select Missing Word is scored as correct or incorrect: choosing the option the recording's argument actually leads to earns the point, and any other choice earns nothing.
There is no partial credit for an option that fits the recording's general topic but not the specific direction its argument was taking. A response that is thematically close but functionally wrong scores exactly the same as one that is entirely unrelated: zero.
There is also no negative marking on this task: choosing a wrong option costs you nothing beyond missing the point for that item, so an educated guess based on partial understanding is always worth making rather than leaving the item unanswered.
Example (written by LexiPTE). A speaker explains that a company tried three different advertising strategies over two years: print adverts, radio spots and a series of short online videos. The first two produced almost no increase in sales despite a large combined budget, while the videos, made for a fraction of that cost, tripled customer enquiries within a month. The speaker concludes: "Looking at these results, the company decided to [BEEP]."
Options: A) abandon advertising altogether. B) shift its entire advertising budget to online video. C) return to print advertising with a larger budget. D) continue all three strategies equally.
Correct answer: B. The recording builds toward a direct comparison in which the cheapest strategy produced by far the best result, so the natural conclusion is that the company would favour it going forward. Option A ignores that one strategy clearly worked. Option C repeats a strategy the recording has already shown to be ineffective, which contradicts the whole point of the comparison. Option D directly contradicts the contrast the speaker just built between a strategy that failed and one that succeeded. Notice that a listener who only caught the final two sentences, without the earlier comparison of budgets and results, would have no way to distinguish B from the other three options with any confidence.
Practise predicting endings before ever revealing the answer options: pause a recording just before its final beep, write your own one-sentence guess at how it should finish, then compare that guess with the given choices. Repeating this over a small set of recordings each session builds the habit of following an argument's direction rather than listening only for its last few words.
Once predicting endings feels natural, add a timed step: after the beep, give yourself only a few seconds to read the options and choose, matching the pace you will need on the actual test.
Keep a short log of the arguments you misread, noting whether the mistake came from losing the thread early in the recording or from misjudging the options at the end; the two problems need different fixes, more attentive listening throughout for the first, and closer comparison of option wording for the second.
