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PTE Trainer

Reading

Multiple Choice, Multiple Answers

Read an academic passage and select every option the text supports. Wrong selections subtract marks.

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Sample item

According to the passage, which TWO factors contributed to the decline? Wrong selections subtract marks.

Coastal fisheries declined through the 1990s. Warming water pushed target species north, while fleet modernisation raised catch efficiency faster than quotas adjusted. Regulatory reform in 2003 stabilised stocks, and tourism revenue was unaffected throughout.

Warming water; increased catch efficiency

Regulatory reform stabilised stocks — it did not cause the decline. Tourism is explicitly stated as unaffected. Both are true statements about the passage, which is exactly how the distractors are built.

How to approach Multiple Choice, Multiple Answers

  1. Read the question and options

    Start with the question stem and all the options, before the passage. You are turning a reading task into a checking task, and knowing what each option claims tells you which parts of the text you actually need to read closely.

  2. Read the passage for structure

    Read the passage through, marking where each option's subject is discussed. The text is short enough to read properly, and locating the relevant lines now saves you rereading the whole thing separately for every option you are asked to evaluate.

  3. Verify each option against a line

    Take the options in order and, for each, find the specific sentence that supports it. Watch for options that reverse a relationship, overstate a hedged claim, or state something true that the passage never actually says. Those are the standard distractors.

  4. Select only what you evidenced

    Tick the options you could point to a line for, and leave the rest. Because a wrong selection cancels out a correct one, adding a plausible fourth pick to three solid ones can leave you with less than you started with.

The method

Treat each option as a claim to be verified against a specific line of the passage, and select it only when you can point to that line. Because a wrong pick cancels out a correct one, two selections you can evidence score higher than four you half-believe. Work through the options in order rather than hunting for the ones that feel right — the distractors are written to feel right.

The mistake that costs most

Selecting everything plausible. With negative marking, a scattergun answer reliably nets zero even when two of your picks were correct.

Other Reading tasks

Frequently asked questions

On multiple-choice multiple-answer tasks and Highlight Incorrect Words, incorrect selections subtract from your score for that item, though the item total cannot go below zero. Other task types award partial credit with no penalty.

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