PTE summarize written text samples for offline practice
Read the passages below and summarize them using one sentence in not more than 75 words(30-35 words). Type your response in the comment section at the bottom of the screen. You have 10 minutes to finish each passage. Your response will be judged on the quality of your writing and on how well your response presents the key points in the passage.
1.
A Regional Signal is one that has a limited geographical range. If a Norwegian, a Korean and a Masai were marooned together on a desert island, they would easily be able to communicate their basic moods and intentions to one another by their actions. All humanity shares a large repertoire of common movements, expressions, and postures. But there would also be misunderstandings. Each man would have acquired from his own culture a special set of Regional Signals that would be meaningless to the others. If the Norwegian were shipwrecked instead with a Swede and a Dane, he would find his task much easier, because their closer origins would mean a greater share of these regional gestures, since localized actions, like many words, do not follow precisely the present-day national boundaries.
This comparison of gestures with words is significant because it reveals immediately our state of ignorance as regards gestural geography. We already know a great deal about linguistic maps, but we know far too little about Gesture Maps. Ask a linguist to describe the distribution of any language you like to name and he will be able to provide accurate, detailed information for you. Take any word, and he will be able to demonstrate its spread from country to country. He can even present you with local dialect maps for some parts of the world and show you, like Professor Higgins in Pygmalion, how slang expressions are limited to certain small areas of big cities. But ask anyone for a world-wide gesture atlas, and you will be disappointed.
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2.
The exploitation of the natural resources of the environment constitutes the productive system of any people, and the organization of this system in primitive society differs in several important respects from our own. The first point which must be mentioned is the character of work. As we have said, most economic effort in primitive society is devoted to the production of food. The activities involved in this have, quite apart from the stimulus of real or potential hunger, a spontaneous interest lacking in the ordinary work of an office or factory in contemporary civilization. This will become clear when we reflect that most of the food-getting activities of primitive peoples, such as fishing, hunting, and gardening, are recreations among ourselves. It does not follow that primitive man takes an undiluted pleasure in such activities much of the labor connected with them is heavy, monotonous or hazardous. But they do possess an inherent interest lacking in most of the economic labor in modern civilization, and much the same applies to primitive technology, in which the craftsman himself creates an artifact, rather than being merely a human cog in the machinery of production.
The spontaneous interest of work under primitive conditions is reinforced by a number of social values attached to it. Skill and industry are honored and laziness condemned, a principle exemplified in the folk songs and proverbs of the Maori. From childhood onwards the virtues of industry are extolled, as in the term ihu puku, literally ‘dirty nose’, applied as a compliment to an industrious man because it implies that he is continually occupied in cultivation with his face to the ground; on the other hand, the twin vices of greed and laziness are condemned in the saying: ‘Deep throat, shallow muscles’. Such social evaluations as these give pride in successful and energetic work and stimulate potential laggards to play their part in the productive effort.
PTE summarize written text samples for offline practice
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