PTE writing practice exercise-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.The existence of pure barter does not necessarily indicate a very primitive form of civilization. Often the system survives long after the community has progressed considerably in other respects. This may be due to conservatism since primitive peoples are reluctant to change their trading methods, even though they are sufficiently intelligent and advanced to adopt more convenient methods.
In some cases, there is prejudice against the adoption of a monetary economy, though such prejudice is usually directed against the use of coins rather than against primitive money. In many cases barter continues to be the principal method of trading long after the adoption of some form of money, for the simple reason that there is not enough money to go round. And a decline in the supply of money often causes a relapse into barter. Distrust in money has also been responsible for reversion to the barter system; such distrust may have been caused by debasement or inflation.
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PTE writing practice exercise-summarize written text
2.
Britain and Japan are the two great pioneers of industrialism and therefore of the modern world. Britain was the pioneer industrial nation of the Western, European-dominated world, Japan of the Eastern, non-European and, to many eyes, the hope of the Third World. The countries have always had much in common. Both groups of islands off an initially more civilized and powerful continent, they had to defend themselves from military and cultural conquest and to that end developed a powerful navy and an independence of mind which made them increasingly different from their continental neighbours. Behind their sea defenses they were able to pursue their own ideals and ambitions which enabled them in the end to originate changes in industry and society which, because they brought wealth and power, others tried to imitate. The British at the height of their imperial power and economic domination recognized in the emerging Japanese a fellow pioneer and an ally. They called her ‘the Britain of the East’ and in the 1902 Treaty were the first to recognize Japan as a world power.
Yet the two countries took utterly different roads to industrialism, power and wealth. Britain, the first industrial nation, evolved slowly without knowing – because nobody then knew what an Industrial Revolution was – where she was going or what the end of modernization would be. Japan, coming late to economic growth in a world which saw and felt only too clearly what the gains and dangers of industrialism were, adopted it self-consciously and with explosive and revolutionary speed. And they still bear the marks of these differences of origin, timing and approach. Britain had the first Industrial Revolution because she had the right kind of society to generate it; but for that very reason she was riot forced to change her society as much as later developing countries, and she now has the wrong kind of society for sustaining a high and continuing rate of economic growth. That does not mean that she has the wrong kind of society to provide a highly civilized and comfortable life for her people. On the contrary, just as the British were pioneers of the industrial society dominated by a gospel of work so they may now be the pioneers of the post-industrial society dedicated to the gospels of leisure and welfare.
Japan, on the other hand, has astonished the world by the degree to which she was prepared to change her society in order to industrialize, and the speed at which, in less than a hundred years, she transformed herself from a feudal society of samurai, artisans, and peasants into one of the most efficient industrial and egalitarian meritocracies in the world. However, it must be said that Tokugawa Japan was no ordinary feudal society, and had hidden advantages for industrial development which most feudal societies lack: one of the most urbanized populations in the world, with a highly educated ruling class of efficient bureaucrats, large numbers of skilled craftsmen and sophisticated merchants, and a more literate populace than most other countries, even in the West. But the fact remains that the leaders of the Meiji Restoration were prepared to abolish feudalism, establish equality before the law, and make everyone, rich or poor, samurai, worker or peasant, contribute to the survival and development of the country.
PTE writing practice exercise-summarize written text
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