PTE Academic speaking read aloud practice sample 9

PTE Academic speaking read aloud practice sample

Look at the text below. In 40 seconds, you must read this text aloud as naturally and clearly as possible. You have 40 seconds to read aloud.

1.According to the Hebrew Bible, Moses had the ornate, gold-plated wooden chest known as the Ark of the Covenant built according to God’s own design. Its purpose was to guard sacred relics, including two stone tablets containing the Ten Commandments. The Israelites carried the Ark throughout their 40 years spent wandering in the wilderness, and later housed it in King Solomon’s temple in Jerusalem. In 607 B.C., the Babylonians besieged the Israelite capital, slaughtering more than a million people and driving the survivors into exile.

2.When the Israelites returned, the Ark had disappeared, along with many other priceless treasures. It’s unknown whether the holy chest was hidden somewhere before the siege as protection, or destroyed by the Babylonian invaders. Whatever the case, archaeologists and treasure hunters have been searching for it for more than a century, with little success.

3.When Hernán Cortés arrived in the Aztec capital of Tenochtitlan in 1519, Emperor Montezuma II greeted him and his men with great ceremony. The Aztecs even offered Cortés gold and silver in the hopes that these white-skinned “gods” would leave Tenochtitlan in peace. Greedy for more, the Spaniards put Montezuma under house arrest instead, and with the help of local allies set about ransacking the city and terrorizing its inhabitants.

PTE Academic speaking re aloud practice sample

4.Spanish forces fled Tenochtitlan under full attack, and were forced to dump all their looted riches in the waters of Lake Texcoco in their mad rush to escape. Though Cortés returned with a rebuilt army the next year and conquered the Aztecs for good, the so-called “Montezuma’s Treasure” would remain lost. According to the most popular theory, the riches still rest on the bottom of Lake Texcoco, though many have searched for it there without success. But as one legend—handed down by some Aztec descendants—has it, more than 2,000 men retrieved the treasures and marched them (with Montezuma’s exhumed corpse) north, perhaps all the way to southern Utah.

5.Women’s rights leader Victoria Woodhull, became the first female candidate for president nearly 50 years before women gained the right to vote. A jack-of-all-trades, the Ohio native ran in 1872 as the Equal Rights Party candidate against incumbent President Ulysses S. Grant. She campaigned on a platform that included an eight-hour workday, women’s suffrage and an end to the death penalty. Woodhull selected abolitionist Frederick Douglass as her running mate , to round out her groundbreaking ticket.

6.Marietta Stow had been a vice presidential candidate eight years prior to her 1892 nomination, when she ran on the Equal Rights Party’s ticket alongside presidential nominee Belva Ann Lockwood. An attorney, politician, educator, author, women’s rights activist and suffragist, Lockwood was not new to trail blazing. After becoming one the first female lawyers in the United States, she successfully petitioned Congress in 1879 to be allowed to practice before the United States Supreme Court—the first woman given this privilege.

PTE Academic Speaking read aloud practice sample

7.The first female to serve in both chambers of the U.S. Congress, and the first female to represent Maine, Margaret Chase Smith was a moderate Republican who strongly opposed the tactics of fellow Senator Joseph McCarthy. On June 1, 1950, she delivered one of the most memorable speeches of her career, “Declaration of Conscience,” where she laid out her opposition to McCarthyism and stated her belief that the basic principles of Americanism included the right to protest, criticize, hold unpopular beliefs and have independent thought.

8.Pioneering politician Shirley Chisholm became the first African-American to be elected to Congress in 1969, where she worked on the Education and Labor Committee and helped form the Black Caucus. Three years later, she made history again by becoming the first African-American woman of a major party to run for a presidential nomination. At the Democratic National Convention in Miami, former Vice President Hubert Humphrey released his 53 African American delegates to vote for Chisholm, giving her 152 delegates—she finished fourth.