PTE summarize spoken text template.You may get 2-3 summarize spoken text in the exam.You will hear a short lecture.Write a summary of the lecture using 50-70 words.You will have 10 minutes to finish the task.written transcript of audio is provided for practice purpose.
1.
Transcript (for practice purpose only, will not be provided in real exam)
For centuries, ideas about language origin have frothed up like soap bubbles, then burst into nothing. Over 2000 years ago, the Egyptian king Psamnietichus, reportedly gave instructions for two new-born children to be brought up in total isolation: to his disappointment, their earliest word was bekos, the Phrygian word for bread. The king reluctantly concluded that the Phrygians predated the Egyptians. But according to John Webb, a 17th-century writer, Chinese was possibly the original language of humankind. Happily, it was spoken by Noah and his family in the Ark, he assumed, and so survived the flood. In the mid-nineteenth century, Abbot O’Donnelly, a Frenchman, claimed a ‘new and prodigious discovery of the original universal language’ supposedly found on an Egyptian obelisk. His translation, he boasted, ‘was sufficient to open the eyes of a mole’. But no one listened, he lamented, with his ‘words and results being blown away by the wind’.
As one weird idea after another bubbled up, language origin was regarded as a playground for cranks, and the topic was banned in 1866 by the Linguistic Society of Paris, the most prominent linguistic association of the time. And disapproval continued: ‘The greater part of what is said and written upon it is mere windy talk’, said the linguist William Dwight Whitney in 1893. The origin of the language web has become a serious field of enquiry only in the last ten years or so, and will be the topic of today’s lecture.
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2.
Transcript (for practice purpose only, will not be provided in real exam)
Almost everyone experiences headaches, with their characteristic pain or throbbing sensation in the head, are an extremely common complaint, at some time or other. Occasionally, they are a symptom of an underlying disorder, but, if they occur on their own, developing gradually and clearing up with no side-effects, they are probably totally harmless, apart from the discomfort they cause. Probably the commonest form of headache is caused by tension, from the contraction of the muscles of the neck, shoulders, and scalp. The second commonest is the result of the swelling of local blood vessels. Many factors can contribute to this. These range from stress, sleeplessness, and drinking and eating too much, to noise and stuffy rooms, but, as far as tension headaches are concerned, one of the commonest causes is poor posture. The muscles of the neck become tense and sore because they have to support the considerable weight of the head in an awkward position. Another common cause is eye strain. This can be due to the simple need for glasses. If headaches persist, it is as well to go to an optician for a check-up, and to work in a good light.
PTE listening-summarize spoken text practice exercise
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