Practise Answer Short Question for PTE Academic. Open a question and work on your response at your own pace.
PTE Core version of this page1937 questions · PTE Academic
Answer Short Question asks a simple question that needs only one word or a few words in response. Give the smallest answer that is accurate and complete — a longer explanation adds no extra credit and creates more chances to drift from the question.
Answer Short Question plays a simple question aloud, and you respond with a single word or a short phrase. With no preparation time and a 10-second answer window, it has the shortest answer time of any speaking task, and it rewards the smallest accurate answer, not the most detailed one.
A short recording asks a question, sometimes alongside an image. Pearson expects one word or a few words in reply, so a full sentence or explanation is unnecessary.
PTE Academic includes 5 to 6 Answer Short Question items. Despite the simple format, it is the only speaking task in PTE Academic scored as correct or incorrect, with no partial credit for a nearly-right answer.
In our experience the difficulty is rarely about specialist knowledge. It is usually about vocabulary retrieval speed: knowing the exact word and producing it within the very short window before the recording cuts off.
Because the longer speaking tasks such as Describe Image and Retell Lecture demand sustained planning, it helps to treat Answer Short Question as a quick, low-pressure item rather than overthinking a simple question. That mindset keeps your pacing steady across the whole Speaking & Writing section.
The recording is very short — 3 to 9 seconds — and may include an image. There is no preparation time and, unlike most speaking tasks, no opening tone: recording starts as soon as the audio finishes, and stops automatically if you wait more than 3 seconds or pause for 3 seconds mid-answer.
Answer Short Question is scored on a single trait, Vocabulary, worth a maximum of 1 point per item: full credit for an appropriate word choice, zero for an inappropriate one. There is no partial credit and no bonus for saying more than needed.
In PTE Academic, this task reports to Listening rather than Speaking, even though you produce a spoken response — the skill being measured is whether you correctly understood and identified the answer to the question, not your pronunciation or fluency in delivering it.
This distinction matters for how you should think about the task: Pronunciation and Oral Fluency are not scored as separate traits here, as they are in Describe Image or Retell Lecture, so the priority is a clear, recognisable answer word. What costs you the point is answering the wrong question or misunderstanding a word in the prompt; padding a correct answer with extra speech is, in our view, an avoidable risk because it adds nothing to the score.
The whole task happens in seconds, so the only real strategy decision is how much to say.
Example (written by LexiPTE) — question played: "What do you call a doctor who treats children?"
A correct, well-scored answer: "A paediatrician." or simply "Paediatrician." Either version gives the single appropriate word the question is looking for, said immediately and clearly.
A weaker answer: "I think it's probably a paediatrician, someone who works with kids in hospitals." This answer eventually contains the correct word, but the extra explanation adds no credit, uses up more of the limited answer time, and increases the risk that the automatic silence cutoff interrupts you mid-sentence before or after the key word.
A third response, "A doctor", shows a common near-miss: it is accurate at a general level but does not answer the specific question asked, which named a particular type of doctor. This kind of answer is the clearest illustration of why 'appropriate word choice' means matching the exact thing the question asks for, not simply staying in the right general category.
Because scoring is binary and time is extremely short, preparation for this task looks more like vocabulary review than speaking practice.
In our experience, many lost points on Answer Short Question come from over-answering or hesitating rather than from not knowing the answer.
This task needs very little dedicated practice time compared with longer speaking tasks, but consistency still helps.
