PTE writing sample papers-summarize written text paragraphs
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.
Today in almost every area of the world one chooses to look at there is a water problem – scarcity, depletion, pollution, lack of sanitation, failing rains due to global warming, big dam projects blocking up rivers, privatisation, inequities of distribution, cross-border conflict, profligate use and mismanagement. Take your pick. But let’s start with overuse.
We learn at school that freshwater on earth follows a cycle: it is constantly being replenished, some of it soaking into the ground and into vegetation, some of it meandering through streams and rivers on its way back to the sea. But at what stage of our lives do we forget this important lesson? The moment one starts using freshwater beyond the rate at which it can be replenished, the hydrological cycle is endangered.
The crisis is particularly acute in relation to our groundwater reserves, lying deep under the surface in aquifers, upon which a third of the world’s population depends. Water can take thousands of years to percolate into aquifers (some contain water from the last ice age). Some have since sealed up, allowing a little possibility of recharge. Because the reserves of water they hold are large, humans have been tapping them like there is no tomorrow. Currently, we are pumping out about 200 billion cubic meters more than can be recharged, steadily using up our water capital.
Take California with its manicured lawns and 560,000 swimming pools. Having taxed the Colorado River to the limit, the region’s aquifers are being guzzled up. By 2020 officials predict a water shortfall nearly equivalent to what the state is currently using. Another more distant water source needs to be found to gulp down. Consumption is the operative word for US water use.
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PTE writing sample papers-summarize written text paragraphs
2.
LAW AND ORDER
As Europeans began to make contact with the aboriginal denizens of the American forests and the remote islands of Oceania, much thought was given to what the original “state of nature” must have been like. Two interpretations were offered. There were those who shared the views of Sir Thomas Hobbes, the British philosopher, that people lacking a sovereign capable of compelling their obedience would destroy themselves in a “war of all against all.” Others, partial to the philosophical speculations of Jean Jacques Rousseau, argued that in “the state of nature” people were peaceful, orderly, honest, and courageous. According to Rousseau, this noble natural endowment was destroyed by the rise of civilization.
Firsthand study of life in a small village and band societies has provided little support for Rousseau’s idyll. Anthropologists have yet to find a culture that is completely harmonious, peaceful, and happy. Although modern anthropological research has led to the rejection of the myth of the noble savage. it nonetheless has confirmed the existence of a remarkable contrast between the way pre state and state-level societies prevent internal conflicts from threatening the survival of their respective populations. Both Rousseau and Hobbes were wrong but of the two. Hobbes was further from the truth.
The whole enormous apparatus of “law and order” associated with modern life is absent among village and band-level cultures. Yet there is no “war of all against all.” The Eskimo, the Bushmen of the Kalahari. the Australian aborigines and many other cultures enjoy a high degree of personal security without having any “sovereign” in Hobbes’s sense. They have no kings, queens, dictators, presidents, governors, or mayors; police officers, National Guard soldiers, sailors, or marines; CIA, FBI, Treasury agents, or federal marshals. They have no written law codes and no formal law courts; no lawyers, bailiffs, bondsmen, judges, district attorneys, juries, or court clerks; and no patrol cars, paddy wagons, jails, or penitentiaries. People managed to get along without these means of law enforcement for tens of thousands of years. Why are contemporary state-level societies so dependent upon them?
PTE writing sample papers-summarize written text paragraphs
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