PTE writing practice passages-summarize written text
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.
It is always the problem of how to change an ideal into a reality that gets in the way of both the leaders and the people. A thought is not a deed and never will be.
We are not magic men. We cannot imagine something into existence – especially a change of behaviour. Just as we have been conditioned to be what we are now – greedy, competitive, stingy, mean – so we need to learn to love, to learn to be free.
Freedom is a difficult thing to handle. How many people given the complete freedom to do whatever they like would die of boredom? No structure, no rules, no compulsion to work from nine to five, no one telling us when to do this, do that – it sounds great until we try it. We’ve learned to be directed by so many others – by mommy, daddy, teacher, principal, boss, policeman, politician, bureaucrat, etc. – that freedom from all this could be overwhelming. Imagine: making love, eating, sleeping, playing … and … ho, hum, now what? Where do you go and what do you do when the trip ends?
Give people freedom and they’ll do all the things they thought they never had a chance to do. But that won’t take very long. And after that? After that, my friend, it’ll be time to make your life meaningful.
Can you do it if you’re free? Can you do it if others no longer require you to do what they say is best? Authority is only necessary for those who need it. Most of us need it because we’ve been taught to believe that we have to be concerned about others. For instance: ‘You’re selfish if you think of yourself,’ or even: ‘Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.’
Sorry friends, but that’s all Christian, authoritarian, manipulative bullshit. You’ve got to get in touch with what your real needs are before you can begin to be of value to others. The other-directedness of Americans that is promoted by mom, God, and the flag has pushed us to the precipice of Fascism in this country. We are no longer able to think for ourselves, we think for the ‘good’ of others. ‘Who am I?’, ‘What do I really want out of life?’ These are considered selfish questions. So a whole society goes down the drain. So it is with communes, whose members are too eager to help their curious ‘brothers,’ who find it remarkably easy to create all kinds of physical and figurative mess and then leave it for the members to clean up.
Sample summary:
People seek personal possessions to make themselves feel valuable and important, and to be like other people.
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PTE writing practice passages-summarize written text
2.
The evidence taken from the observation of the behavior of apes and children suggests that there are three clearly separable groups of simple causes for the outbreak of fighting and the exhibition of aggressiveness by individuals.
One of the most common causes of fighting among both children and apes was over the possession of external objects. The disputed ownership of any desired object – food, clothes, toys, females, and the affection of others – was sufficient ground for an appeal to force. On Monkey Hill disputes over females were responsible for the death of thirty out of thirty-three females. Two points are of particular interest to notice about these fights for possession.
In the first place they are often carried to such an extreme that they end in the complete destruction of the objects of common desire. Toys are torn to pieces. Females are literally torn limb from limb. So overriding is the aggression once it has begun that it not only overflows all reasonable boundaries of selfishness but utterly destroys the object for which the struggle began and even the self for whose advantage the struggle was undertaken.
In the second place it is observable, at least in children, that the object for whose possession aggression is started may sometimes be desired by one person only or merely because it is desired by someone else. There were many cases observed by Dr Isaacs where toys and other objects which had been discarded as useless were violently defended by their owners when they became the object of some other child’s desire. The grounds of possessiveness may, therefore, be irrational in the sense that they are derived from inconsistent judgments of value. Whether sensible or irrational, contests over possession are commonly the occasion for the most ruthless use of force among children and apes.
PTE writing practice passages-summarize written text
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