Practise Summarize Written Text for PTE Academic. Open a question and work on your response at your own pace.
PTE Core version of this page435 questions · PTE Academic
Summarize Written Text gives you a passage to compress into a single accurate summary. Find the passage's controlling idea, connect only the essential support, and remove examples that do not change the conclusion — the response rules differ between Academic and Core.
Summarize Written Text gives you a reading passage and asks you to compress it into exactly one sentence. The challenge is not finding words — it is finding the passage's controlling idea and connecting only the support that actually explains it, all inside a strict 5-75 word, single-sentence rule.
A written passage of up to 300 words appears on screen. You have 10 minutes to read it and write a single-sentence summary that captures its main idea and essential supporting points.
PTE Academic includes 2 Summarize Written Text items. The task reports to both Reading and Writing, since it tests your ability to extract meaning from a passage as much as your ability to construct a grammatical sentence.
You get 10 minutes per item, covering both reading the passage and writing your summary. The response must be a single sentence, between 5 and 75 words.
Summarize Written Text is scored on four traits: Content (up to 4), Form (up to 1), Grammar (up to 2) and Vocabulary (up to 2). Pearson's Academic Score Guide says Content is also reviewed by a human expert before your score is finalised.
Form is worth a single point: 1 point if your response is one single complete sentence, and 0 if it is not one sentence, contains fewer than 5 or more than 75 words, or is written in all capitals. Critically, if either Content or Form scores 0, the entire response scores 0 — a technically well-written sentence that misses the passage's main point still fails, and a well-argued response that breaks the one-sentence or word-count rule also fails, regardless of its content.
Grammar and Vocabulary are each worth up to 2 points, so once Content and Form are secure, a clean, precise sentence is where the remaining marks come from. Pearson's Score Guide treats this task as partial credit: the four trait scores are added together rather than marked simply right or wrong.
Spend real time on reading and planning before you write a word — the sentence itself should be quick to produce once you know what it needs to say.
A useful starting structure: "Although [qualification], [controlling idea], because [essential support], which [result]." This is a relationship map to adapt, not a sentence to force onto every passage — some passages are chronological rather than causal, and inserting 'because' where the text does not establish causation misrepresents the passage, which is exactly what the Content trait is there to catch.
If the passage is chronological, preserve the sequence using words like 'first', 'subsequently' and 'ultimately' instead of forcing a cause-and-effect frame. If it presents a contrast without stating a cause, 'although' or 'while' can carry the whole sentence without needing 'because' at all.
Whatever frame you use, the sentence must remain grammatically a single sentence — joining independent clauses with only a comma (a comma splice) risks the response being read as more than one sentence, which Form does not allow, even if the word count and meaning are both correct.
Example (written by LexiPTE) — passage: "Urban trees can reduce summer temperatures by shading streets and releasing moisture into the air. However, simply counting how many trees a city plants can give a misleading picture of progress. Young trees provide limited shade, some species struggle in hotter conditions, and poorly chosen planting sites may leave the warmest neighbourhoods without meaningful coverage. Long-term maintenance is equally important because trees need water, healthy soil and protection from construction damage. Cities should therefore measure canopy growth and its distribution, not only the number of seedlings planted."
Idea hierarchy: topic — urban tree planting and heat; controlling idea — seedling counts are an inadequate measure of progress; support — cooling depends on survival, canopy size, placement and maintenance; result — cities should measure canopy growth and distribution instead.
A strong 41-word summary: "Although urban trees can reduce heat, seedling totals alone do not show real progress because effective cooling depends on suitable placement, survival and maintenance, so cities should measure canopy growth and distribution to target the neighbourhoods with the greatest heat exposure."
This single sentence preserves the passage's qualification ("although"), its criticism of seedling counts, its supporting reasons, and its recommendation, all within the word limit and as one grammatically complete sentence.
Because Form and Content can each independently zero your score, practise both the reading-comprehension side and the sentence-construction side deliberately.
Because Content or Form at 0 zeroes the whole response, small structural errors are more costly here than in most writing tasks.
Treat finding the controlling idea and constructing a compliant sentence as two separate skills to build before combining them under time pressure.
