A paragraph with gaps and a word bank below it — drag words into gaps. The catch that defines the task: there are more words than gaps, and the spare ones aren’t random. They’re chosen to look plausible.
Grammar → collocation → meaning. In that order.
Agonising over the ambiguous gap first, with the full bank still in play, is the slowest possible route.
✓ Fix: place the certain ones first. A smaller bank turns hard gaps into easy ones.Distractors bank on you matching by meaning alone — “analysis” where the gap needs “analyse”.
✓ Fix: name the part of speech each gap requires before touching the bank.Some students treat leftover words as an error and rearrange good answers to use them. The leftovers are supposed to be left over.
✓ Fix: when the passage reads naturally end to end, stop. Spare words are by design.Individually plausible choices can still produce one sentence that clunks — and each clunk is a point.
✓ Fix: 30 seconds to read the completed paragraph aloud in your head; swap anything that trips.Elimination speed comes from reps against real distractor patterns.
On The PTE Master, drag-and-drop Fill in the Blanks runs exam-style with instant per-blank marking — you see exactly which gaps you dropped and what the right word was, across hundreds of passages of distractor patterns.
Real distractor banks, instant per-blank scoring, hundreds of passages.
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