PTE Academic Reading Tips: Fill in the Blanks Strategy

PTE Reading is 29 to 30 minutes for the entire section. With five task types to complete and one of them — Reading and Writing Fill in the Blanks — contributing to both your Reading and Writing scores, time management is where most candidates lose points before they even get to the hard questions.

Here is how to approach each task, with most attention on the tasks that carry the most scoring weight.

Reading and Writing Fill in the Blanks: Your Highest-Value Reading Task

R&W Fill in the Blanks (often called Reading FIB or RWFIB) presents a passage with blank spaces. You select the correct word for each blank from a drop-down list. This task contributes to both Reading and Writing sections — it is the only Reading task with cross-section scoring, which makes it disproportionately valuable.

Each correctly filled blank is a point in Reading and a point in Writing. With 5 to 6 items per test, each containing 4 to 5 blanks, this task can deliver 20 to 25 combined Reading and Writing points. Do not rush through it.

The collocation approach. Most blanks test collocations — words that naturally go together in academic English. The blank is almost never about meaning alone; it is about which word fits the surrounding words. "Conduct research" is the correct collocation, not "do research" or "make research," even though all three convey the same general idea. When you see a blank, look at the words immediately before and after it. What preposition follows the blank? What verb precedes the noun that is blank? Collocational fit usually eliminates two or three options immediately.

Part of speech first. Before considering meaning, identify what part of speech the blank requires. If the blank follows "the" and precedes a verb, it is almost certainly a noun. If it follows an auxiliary verb and precedes a past participle, it might be an adverb. Ruling out the wrong parts of speech quickly narrows your options.

Look for repetition and synonym patterns. Academic texts often introduce a concept and then refer to it again using a synonym or related word. If you have identified the main topic of the passage, check whether any blank might be filled by a word that has already appeared in a different form earlier in the text.

Reading Fill in the Blanks: Drag-and-Drop Version

The second FIB task type uses a word bank — you drag words into blanks. Unlike the drop-down version, there are more words in the bank than there are blanks, so some words are distractors.

The same collocation strategy applies, but here you also need to track which words are left over after you make your selections. If you have used what seems like the right word for each blank but the remaining words include something that clearly fits one of your choices better, reconsider. Work the word bank systematically and save the hardest blank for last — by elimination, it may become clear.

This task contributes to Reading only (not Writing).

Re-order Paragraphs

You are given 4 to 6 scrambled sentence fragments and asked to arrange them in the correct logical order. This task is time-consuming relative to its score contribution, which means you should approach it with a clear, fast method rather than reading everything multiple times.

Find the independent sentence first. The opening sentence of any logical sequence typically introduces the subject without referring back to something else. It will not begin with pronouns like "they," "this," "it," or "these" that require an antecedent. It will not begin with discourse markers like "however," "therefore," or "consequently" that signal a relationship to a previous point. Find the self-contained sentence — that is your first sentence.

Follow the referencing chain. After placing the opening sentence, look for the sentence that refers to what was just introduced. If the opening sentence mentions "a new policy," the next sentence will likely begin with "The policy" or "It" or "This approach." Trail the anaphoric references to build the sequence.

Use time markers as anchors. If any sentence contains a time expression ("In 2020," "subsequently," "three years later," "at the same time"), use these as structural anchors. They reveal chronological relationships that fix the order of those sentences relative to each other.

Do not spend more than 90 seconds per Re-order Paragraphs item. If you are still uncertain after 90 seconds, make your best guess and move on. The task is medium-priority compared to FIBs — do not let it consume time that would be better spent on Fill in the Blanks.

Multiple Choice (Single and Multiple Answers)

Multiple Choice Single Answer is straightforward — you choose the one best answer. Read the question before reading the passage. Knowing what you are looking for turns the reading into a targeted search rather than full comprehension.

Multiple Choice Multiple Answers has negative marking. You lose one point for every incorrect selection. This is the only Reading task where a wrong answer actively reduces your score below what you would have received by skipping the question.

The strategy: select only options you are confident are correct. If you are 90% certain about one option and 50-50 about a second, select only the first. Adding an uncertain second option when negative marking is in play is a net-negative expected value decision.

If you are completely uncertain about all options, select one answer only — the expected value of one random selection from four is better than the expected value of two random selections with negative marking applied to the second.

Multiple Choice Reading: Time Allocation

The Reading section is 29 to 30 minutes. A workable time allocation:

• Reading and Writing Fill in the Blanks: 10–12 minutes total (highest priority, contributes to Writing)
• Reading Fill in the Blanks (drag-and-drop): 5–6 minutes
• Re-order Paragraphs: 6–8 minutes
• Multiple Choice (both types): remaining time

If you find yourself running over time on Re-order Paragraphs, make a decision and move on. Running out of time before completing the FIB tasks costs you more than a wrong answer on Multiple Choice.

For candidates building toward 79+ in Reading, the PTE Academic Preparation Guide includes a collocation reference section and a complete walkthrough of the FIB strategy across different academic topic areas — because collocation patterns vary by field (scientific writing, social science writing, humanities writing each have distinct collocation habits that appear repeatedly in PTE Reading passages).