Fill in the Blanks: Drag and Drop Practice Questions

Fill in the Blanks (Drag and Drop) gives you a short passage with several gaps and one shared word bank that always holds more words than you need. That extra supply is the whole point of the task: it forces you to compare gaps against each other rather than solving each one alone. This guide covers the format, the scoring, and a worked example showing how to use the leftover words as evidence.

What Fill in the Blanks (Drag and Drop) is

Fill in the Blanks (Drag and Drop) is one of the five Reading question types on PTE Academic, and it also appears on PTE Core. A short passage is shown with several words removed, and a word bank beneath it lists more candidate words than there are gaps. You drag each word from the bank into the gap it belongs in.

The task differs from the dropdown version of Fill in the Blanks in one important way: here, all the gaps share a single pool of words, so once you use a word in one gap, it is no longer available for another. That shared pool is what makes comparing gaps to each other useful — sometimes the clearest way to solve a difficult gap is to first fill the easier ones and see what is left over.

Format and timing

Unlike most of the other Reading task types, the passage length for Drag and Drop is identical on both exams: Pearson caps it at 80 words on PTE Academic and on PTE Core.

There is no dedicated timer for this task; it draws on the Reading section's shared clock, which runs about 23-30 minutes on PTE Academic and about 27-37 minutes on PTE Core.

How it is scored

Scoring is partial credit: you earn one point for each gap you fill with the correct word, and the item score cannot fall below zero, so a gap you fill incorrectly simply earns nothing. An item with five gaps can therefore score anywhere from zero to five, and a wrong word in one gap does not affect the points available at any other gap.

Because the shared word bank contains more words than gaps, some words in the bank are always intended to be left unused. Placing an unused word into a gap simply prevents that gap from scoring — it does not create any additional penalty beyond the point you did not earn.

Step-by-step method

This method is a suggested routine, not a Pearson rule. Its purpose is to let the easy gaps shrink the word bank before you commit to the difficult ones, because every word you place correctly is one fewer distractor left to consider.

• Read the whole passage first, then scan the complete word bank before dragging anything, so you know every candidate word available.
• Fill the gaps you find clearest first — the ones where grammar or an obvious collocation points to a single word — since each correct placement removes that word from consideration elsewhere.
• For remaining gaps, check what is left in the bank rather than starting your search from every English word you can think of.
• Watch for near-synonyms in the bank that fit a gap's general meaning but not its grammar or its specific collocation.
• Once every gap is filled, reread the passage as connected prose and confirm the words left unused are genuinely unrelated to any remaining gap.
• If two words both seem to fit a gap, check the words immediately before and after it for a fixed pattern that only one of them completes.

Worked example

Example (written by LexiPTE). This passage is an original exercise, not a real exam item, built to show how the leftover-word logic works in practice.

Word bank: reduce, reduction, gradually, sudden, encourage, encouragement, adopt.

Passage: "City planners hope that wider bicycle lanes will [1] more residents to cycle to work. Early results from similar projects suggest that change happens [2] rather than overnight, as commuters slowly [3] new habits over several months."

Gap 1 needs a base-form verb after the modal "will": encourage. "Encouragement" is a noun and cannot follow "will" directly.

Gap 2 needs an adverb describing how change happens: gradually. "Sudden" is an adjective and cannot modify the verb "happens" in this position; the sentence also explicitly contrasts with "overnight", which rules out any word suggesting suddenness.

Gap 3 needs a present-tense verb that agrees with the plural subject "commuters" and takes "new habits" as its object: adopt. At this point "reduce" and "reduction" remain in the bank, but neither fits the meaning of forming new habits, and they are correctly left unused.

This example shows the usual pattern: grammar narrows each gap to one or two live candidates, and the leftover words at the end confirm rather than contradict your choices.

Strategies that work

• Solve the gaps you are confident about first; removing those words from the bank makes every remaining gap easier by narrowing its candidates.
• Group the word bank mentally by part of speech before you start dragging, since many wrong placements come from confusing a noun form with its related verb or adjective.
• Do not assume every word in the bank belongs somewhere — Pearson deliberately includes words that should stay unused.
• If a gap still has two plausible words after grammar and meaning checks, look one more time for a fixed collocation that only one of them forms.
• Treat the shortest, plainest gaps as your entry point into the passage rather than the gap that happens to appear first — an easy third gap can unlock a harder first one.

Common mistakes

• Forcing every word from the bank into a gap, on the assumption that unused words must indicate an error.
• Filling gaps strictly left to right instead of starting with the ones you can solve with certainty.
• Confusing a word's noun, verb and adjective forms when they look similar, such as "reduce" and "reduction".
• Ignoring the passage's overall meaning once a word grammatically fits, without checking that it fits this passage's specific argument.

Practice plan

• Practise with word banks that deliberately include a word's noun, verb and adjective forms together, so you build speed at separating them by part of speech.
• Time yourself on short passages of up to 80 words, the maximum Pearson states for this task, so your practice texts match the real item size.
• After each practice set, write down which unused words tempted you and why, since repeated confusion with the same word pairs is worth targeted review.
• Combine this task with the dropdown version of Fill in the Blanks in mixed practice sets, since the two require slightly different habits and candidates often default to whichever one they practised most recently.