PTE Describe Image: a template that works, and the mistakes that cost you marks

Describe Image is the task most PTE candidates dread, and the one where a template helps most — because the pressure is not the image, it is the 25 seconds before you speak.

You get 25 seconds to prepare and 40 seconds to speak. That is the whole task. The scorer marks you on content, oral fluency and pronunciation, and it is marking continuously — every hesitation is data.

The template

Say these five things, in this order, every time:

1. Type — "This is a bar chart showing…" / "This line graph illustrates…"
2. Subject — what it measures and over what period
3. Highest — the largest value, with its label and number
4. Lowest or a contrast — the smallest value, or a clear change
5. Close — "Overall, the data shows…"

Five sentences. Roughly 35 seconds at a natural pace. The point of a fixed order is not elegance — it is that you never stop to think about what comes next, because that pause is what the fluency score punishes.

Use your 25 seconds on numbers, not sentences

Do not rehearse phrasing. You already know the phrasing — that is what the template is for. Spend preparation time reading two numbers off the image: the highest and the lowest, with their labels.

A response with two specific values beats a fluent response with none, because content is scored on whether you described this image rather than images in general.

What actually costs marks

Stopping. A three-second silence hurts more than a wrong word. If you lose your place, keep going with the next item in the list — the scorer cannot reward a sentence you did not say.

Running out of time mid-sentence. Your recording cuts at 40 seconds regardless. Aim to finish around 35 and stop; trailing off into silence is fine, being cut off mid-clause is not.

Describing nothing specific. "The chart shows various categories with different values" is grammatically perfect and scores almost nothing on content. Name a category. Say a number.

Over-describing. Five items is enough. Trying to cover every bar guarantees you get cut off, and an unfinished tour of the data scores worse than a complete five-sentence answer.

Reading the title aloud and stopping. Common under panic. The title is step 1 of 5, not the answer.

It works on every image type

• Bar chart / line graph — the template as written
• Pie chart — largest slice, smallest slice, same order
• Map — location instead of "highest", two features instead of two values
• Process diagram — first step, last step, number of stages
• Photograph — what it is, what is in the foreground, what is in the background

The five slots do not change. Only what fills slot 3 and 4 changes.

The thing a template cannot fix

A template gets you through the 25 seconds. It does not tell you whether your pronunciation and fluency are actually scoring where you think they are — and those are machine-scored on PTE, so your own ear is not a reliable judge.

That is the part worth checking against a scorer rather than a friend. Take a free PTE mock test and get a per-word pronunciation score on your own Describe Image answer, then look at the PTE score chart to see what your target actually needs.