Summarize Spoken Text is a Part 3 task. You hear a recording of 45 to 75 seconds, then have 8 minutes to write a summary of 20 to 30 words.
Note the numbers, because PTE Academic’s version is different: Academic allows 50 to 70 words and 10 minutes. Practising the Academic limit for a Core test produces a summary twice as long as the marker will accept.
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| Element | PTE Core | PTE Academic (for contrast) |
|---|---|---|
| Audio length | 45-75 seconds | 60-90 seconds |
| Time to write | 8 minutes | 10 minutes |
| Word limit | 20-30 words | 50-70 words |
| Plays | Once | Once |
| Skills scored | Listening and Writing | Listening and Writing |
| Include | Leave out |
|---|---|
| The single main claim of the recording | Examples and illustrations |
| One supporting reason or qualification | Names, dates and figures unless the whole point is numerical |
| The speaker’s conclusion if there is one | The speaker’s asides and digressions |
| — | Your own opinion or evaluation |
| — | An introduction such as “In this talk the speaker discusses…” |
An opening phrase like “The speaker explains that” costs five of your thirty words and adds nothing. Start with the content.
| Column | What to write |
|---|---|
| 1 — Topic | Two or three words naming the subject |
| 2 — Main claim | The one sentence the recording exists to make |
| 3 — Because | The reason or mechanism given |
| 4 — But | Any qualification, exception or counterpoint |
Four short lines. Anything more and you are transcribing rather than listening, and a 30-word summary cannot use more than four lines anyway.
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Transcript “Employers fund far more training than they did a decade ago, but the motive is not generosity. The main driver is retention — staff who receive training stay longer, and replacing an experienced employee costs several times what a course does. There is a mismatch, though. Companies prefer training specific to their own systems, because it feeds straight into productivity. Employees prefer transferable qualifications, which are more valuable precisely because you can take them elsewhere. That tension is why so much corporate training is compulsory rather than requested, and why voluntary schemes are usually less used than the budget assumed.” |
Notes
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Topic: employer-funded training |
Model summary (27 words)
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Employers fund training mainly to retain staff rather than from generosity, but firms want system-specific courses while employees prefer transferable qualifications, so voluntary take-up stays low. |
| What this summary does |
|---|
| States the main claim in the first six words |
| Includes the reason without the cost comparison |
| Includes the tension, which is half the recording |
| Drops the productivity mechanism, which does not fit |
| One sentence, 27 words — comfortably inside the range |
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Transcript “Home delivery has changed city-centre traffic in ways planners did not expect. In some districts vans now account for more vehicle movements than private cars, and because they stop frequently and unpredictably, their effect on flow is greater than the numbers suggest. Several cities have set up consolidation centres at the edge of the controlled zone, where parcels from different carriers are combined and delivered by one vehicle. The engineering is simple. The problem is commercial: carriers compete on speed and do not want to hand the final leg to a shared operator. Where it has worked, the authority made zone access conditional on using the shared service.” |
Model summary (26 words)
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Delivery vans now disrupt city traffic disproportionately; consolidation centres could help, but the obstacle is commercial rather than technical, and only compulsory access rules have made them work. |
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Transcript “Coastal salt marsh sits between land and sea, flooded and drained twice a day. It does three useful things. It slows incoming waves, so less energy reaches the sea wall behind. It traps sediment, gaining height over time, which in principle lets it keep pace with rising sea level — though that depends on sediment supply, which has fallen where rivers upstream are dammed. And it stores carbon in waterlogged soils, but only while the marsh stays wet; drained marsh releases it. The main threat is coastal squeeze: the marsh would migrate landward as the sea rises, but a sea wall stops it, so it is compressed and eventually lost.” |
Model summary (29 words)
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Salt marsh reduces wave energy, traps sediment and stores carbon, but sea walls prevent it migrating inland as sea level rises, so coastal squeeze eventually destroys it. |
The three functions are compressed into one clause of eight words. At 30 words a list has to become a list.
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Transcript “Putting a monetary value on a park is harder than it looks. Hedonic pricing reads the value off house prices, which works but only captures what property markets capitalise — it values the park to people who can afford to live beside it and registers nothing for the weekly visitor arriving by bus. Contingent valuation asks people directly, and the answers are distorted: respondents name higher figures for a gain than they accept for the same loss, and their answers move with whatever number the survey mentions first. Physical indicators avoid all this but cannot enter a cost-benefit analysis, because the units are wrong.” |
Model summary (28 words)
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Valuing parks is difficult: house-price methods miss non-residents, survey methods produce distorted answers, and physical indicators are accurate but cannot be compared with project costs. |
| Minutes | Task |
|---|---|
| During audio | Four note lines: topic, claim, because, but |
| 0-1 | Circle the main claim. Everything else is optional |
| 1-3 | Write one sentence containing the claim and one supporting point |
| 3-4 | Count the words |
| 4-6 | Cut or add. Under 20, add the qualification; over 30, cut adjectives and examples first |
| 6-8 | Check spelling, subject-verb agreement and that it reads as one grammatical sentence |
Eight minutes is generous for 30 words. Use the surplus on the word count and the grammar, which are the two things markers can measure exactly.
| Long version | Words | Compressed | Words |
|---|---|---|---|
| The speaker explains that employers fund training | 7 | Employers fund training | 3 |
| because it is cheaper than replacing staff who leave | 9 | to retain staff | 3 |
| Companies want training that is specific to their systems | 9 | firms want system-specific courses | 4 |
| which has the effect of reducing take-up | 7 | so take-up stays low | 4 |
| It slows waves, it traps sediment and it stores carbon | 10 | It reduces wave energy, traps sediment and stores carbon | 9 |
| Technique | Effect |
|---|---|
| Delete meta-framing (“the speaker says that”) | Saves 4-6 words |
| Use hyphenated compounds (“system-specific”) | Two words become one |
| Replace clauses with prepositional phrases (“to retain staff”) | Saves 4-6 words |
| Share one subject across three verbs | Saves 4 words per extra verb |
| Cut every example | Examples never fit at 30 words |
| Error | Effect | Fix |
|---|---|---|
| Writing 50 to 70 words | Outside the Core range — penalised | That is the Academic limit; Core is 20 to 30 |
| Under 20 words | Penalised, and usually missing content | Add the qualification from your “but” line |
| Copying phrases verbatim | Reduces the writing score | Paraphrase using your notes, not remembered wording |
| Including your own opinion | Not part of the task | Report only what was said |
| Listing every point | Nothing is developed and the limit is breached | Main claim plus one supporting point |
| Two ungrammatical fragments | Grammar is scored | One or two complete sentences |
| Trying to write during the audio | You stop listening | Four note lines only |
Between 20 and 30, with 24 to 27 as the safe target. This is one of the clearest differences from PTE Academic, where the same task requires 50 to 70 words — writing the Academic length in a Core test is penalised.
The audio runs 45 to 75 seconds and plays once, and you then have 8 minutes to write. PTE Academic gives 10 minutes for its longer summary.
Listening and Writing, which makes it one of the higher-value tasks in Part 3 and worth the note-taking preparation.
Four lines: the topic, the main claim, the reason given, and any qualification. More than that and you are transcribing instead of listening, and a 30-word summary cannot use more than four lines of material anyway.
No. At 20 to 30 words there is room for the main claim and one supporting point, and examples are the first thing to cut. If an example is the only content you remember, state the claim it illustrates instead.
Copying reduces your writing score, and paraphrasing is part of what the task assesses. Write from your notes rather than from remembered wording, which also protects you from reproducing a phrase you misheard.
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