PTE Reading: Fill in the Blanks

PTE Academic's Reading part includes a "Fill in the Blanks" task where a passage has several blanks, and you drag words from a shared word bank below it into the correct positions. The word bank always contains more words than there are blanks, so some listed words are deliberate distractors that don't correctly fit any blank. Because this task draws on reading comprehension, grammar, and vocabulary together, it contributes meaningfully to your Reading score.

The most effective approach is to read the entire passage once, ignoring the blanks, to understand its overall meaning before selecting any words. Then, for each blank, use grammatical clues from the surrounding sentence -- the preposition that follows, the verb tense being used, whether a singular or plural form is needed -- together with collocation (words that commonly and naturally pair together) to narrow down which word bank option actually fits, rather than picking a word just because it feels topically related.

A related but distinct Reading task type, sometimes just called Fill in the Blanks (Reading), uses a dropdown menu of a few options for each individual blank instead of one shared word bank for the whole passage -- the same grammar-and-context strategy applies to that variant too.

Below is an original passage with three blanks, followed by a word bank. Practice applying the strategy above, then check your reasoning against the questions that follow.

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Passage (original, academic style -- deep-sea vent ecosystems):

When researchers first explored hydrothermal vents on the ocean floor in the late 1970s, they were surprised to find dense communities of life clustered around the scalding, mineral-rich water. Unlike almost every other ecosystem on Earth, these communities do not (1) on sunlight as their primary energy source. Instead, specialized bacteria convert chemical compounds released from the vents into usable energy through a process called chemosynthesis, and larger organisms such as tube worms (2) on these bacteria, either by consuming them directly or by hosting them internally in a symbiotic relationship. Because vent ecosystems can appear and disappear as geological activity shifts over time, scientists still debate how quickly a newly formed vent is (3) by organisms traveling from other, sometimes distant, vent sites.

Word bank: rely, generate, escape, illuminate, depend, colonized, discovered, abandoned