Fill in the Blanks: Dropdown Practice Questions

Fill in the Blanks (Dropdown) checks whether you can complete an academic passage using grammar, collocation and meaning rather than guesswork. Every gap carries its own drop-down menu, so treat each one as an independent decision even when a word seems to fit the passage's topic in general. This guide covers the exact format, how Pearson scores it, and a worked example with the reasoning written out.

What Fill in the Blanks (Dropdown) is

Fill in the Blanks (Dropdown) is one of the five question types in the PTE Academic Reading section, and it also appears on PTE Core. You read an academic-style passage with several words removed. Next to each gap sits a drop-down list of options; you open the list and choose the word that belongs in that specific sentence. There is no audio and no per-item timer — the task shares the Reading section's overall clock, so pacing across the whole section matters as much as any single item.

The task is closely related to Fill in the Blanks (Drag and Drop), but the two work differently under the hood. Here, each gap has its own private set of options, so one gap's answer never competes with another's. That makes the task feel more contained, but it also means you cannot use "leftover" logic — the option you reject at one gap tells you nothing about which option belongs at the next.

Format and timing

Passage length and the skill it counts toward both change between exams, even though the on-screen task looks identical.

The Reading section as a whole runs about 23-30 minutes on PTE Academic and about 27-37 minutes on PTE Core, and this task is one of five sharing that time. Pearson does not publish a separate time limit for it, so your own pacing decisions — not a countdown attached to this specific task — protect the rest of the section.

How it is scored

Scoring is fully additive and never negative. Each blank you complete correctly earns one point, independently of every other blank, and there is no penalty for a wrong choice beyond simply not scoring that blank. Getting three of six gaps right still banks three points — you do not need a perfect passage to receive credit.

On PTE Academic, the points from this task count toward your Reading score only. On PTE Core, the same task also contributes to your Writing score, because Pearson classes it as a Reading and Writing item on Core. The way you answer it does not change between the two exams — only which score column benefits from your points.

Step-by-step method

• Skim the whole passage once before opening any drop-down, so you know its topic and overall direction.
• At each gap, read the words immediately before and after it and decide what part of speech is required — noun, verb, adjective, adverb or connector.
• Open the drop-down and eliminate any option that is the wrong part of speech straight away, before you weigh meaning at all.
• Among the remaining options, check tense, number and any fixed preposition pattern the sentence demands.
• If two options are still grammatically possible, choose the one that forms the more natural word partnership with its neighbours.
• Once every gap is filled, reread the whole passage in one pass to confirm it still reads as connected prose, not five separate answers.

Worked example

Example (written by LexiPTE). This passage is an original exercise, not a real exam item, built to show the reasoning behind each choice rather than to test you.

Local libraries increasingly [1] their spaces to double as community meeting rooms, event venues and quiet study halls. This shift [2] a wider change in how city planners think about public buildings: a single-purpose building is now seen as a missed opportunity. Some critics worry that turning libraries into all-purpose venues will [3] their core role of lending books and supporting research.

Notice that meaning alone was not enough to solve any of these three gaps — grammar decided every one of them. That is deliberate: in practice, options can be close enough in meaning that grammar and collocation are what separate a correct answer from a plausible-sounding wrong one.

• Gap 1: adapt. The subject "libraries" is plural and the verb is in the present simple, so the base form matches. "Adaptable" is an adjective and "adaptation" is a noun — neither can serve as the sentence's main verb.
• Gap 2: reflects. The subject "shift" is singular and third person, so the verb needs an -s ending. "Reflect" would break subject-verb agreement, and "reflecting" cannot stand alone as a finite verb here.
• Gap 3: threaten. It follows the modal verb "will", which always takes a bare infinitive. "Threatens" and "threatening" are both ruled out by that grammar rule alone, before meaning even enters the decision.

Strategies that work

• Always read the full passage before touching a drop-down — the first sentence rarely tells you enough about the passage's argument to solve later gaps.
• Treat part of speech as your first filter, every time; it removes at least one implausible option at almost every gap.
• Build a short personal list of the preposition patterns you keep missing, such as "responsible for" or "consist of", and review it before each practice session.
• Do not let one uncertain gap slow down the rest of the passage — commit to your best answer and move on, since every gap is scored independently.
• When you finish, reread the completed passage as ordinary prose rather than as a list of five separate answers.

Common mistakes

• Picking a word because it fits the passage's general topic, then discovering it does not fit that particular sentence's grammar.
• Checking only the words before the gap and ignoring the words that come immediately after it.
• Spending too long on one difficult gap and running out of time for the rest of the Reading section.
• Treating this as a pure vocabulary quiz and forgetting that, on Core, it also counts toward your Writing score.

Practice plan

• Start by practising gaps in isolation: take any short paragraph, remove single words by hand, and name only the part of speech each gap needs before you think about meaning at all.
• Move on to timed sets of five or six passages in a row — Pearson's item range for this task on PTE Academic is 5-6 — so you build a sense of pace for the Reading section as a whole.
• Keep a running list of the collocations you get wrong, grouped by pattern (verb plus preposition, adjective plus noun, and so on), and revisit it weekly.
• In your final week, mix this task with the other four Reading task types in one sitting, so you practise switching between formats under section-level time pressure rather than drilling this one task alone.