PTE short answer questions: the list is the easy part
Aman Batth · 15 min read · · Updated
You get ten seconds, not three, and on PTE Academic this task cannot touch your speaking score at all. Practice items grouped by field so they are actually learnable, plus the reason candidates lose items they knew the answer to.
If you are searching for a list of PTE short answer questions, that is a reasonable thing to want, and there is one further down this page — around sixty items, grouped by subject rather than dumped alphabetically, because grouping is what makes them stick.
But before the list, two facts that most pages on this topic get wrong, and both of them change how you should practise.
The first is the clock. Several widely copied pages state that you have three seconds to respond. You do not. Pearson's own test format page gives the prompt as 3 to 9 seconds long and your time to answer as 10 seconds (PTE Academic speaking format). Three seconds is the length of the question, not the length of your window. That is a factor-of-three error about the single constraint the task is built around.
The second is whose score this is. On PTE Academic, Answer Short Question does not feed your speaking score. Pearson states it flatly on the same page: "your speaking and writing skills are not tested by this question type." It is a listening item that happens to use a microphone.
We build the engine that marks speaking and writing answers on Hilingo, so the rest of this is written from the marking side — what a machine has to do with a one-word answer, and where that leaves marks on the floor.
What the task actually is
| PTE Academic | PTE Core | |
|---|---|---|
| Prompt length | 3–9 seconds | 3–9 seconds |
| Time to answer | 10 seconds | 10 seconds |
| Number of items | 5–6 | appears in Part 1 |
| Skills scored | Listening | Listening and speaking |
| Scoring | Correct or incorrect | Correct or incorrect |
| Trait | Vocabulary, worth 1 point | Vocabulary, worth 1 point |
Sources: the PTE Academic and PTE Core test format pages, and the PTE Academic Test Taker Score Guide for the item count and the trait.
There is no partial credit. You either produced an acceptable word or you did not. One point, five or six times, and the item is over in under twenty seconds including the question.
Which candidate are you? The honest answer
This is the part a list cannot give you, and it decides whether the list below is worth an hour of your time.
Read the "skills scored" row again, because the two tests genuinely differ:
- On PTE Academic it is a listening item and nothing else. Five or six points, feeding one skill.
- On PTE Core it is an integrated item, scored for listening and speaking at the same time — the same one point lands in two columns.
The full task-to-skill map for both tests, with Pearson's page numbers, is in PTE marks distribution. What follows from it here:
Practise this task if your listening score is the one capping your profile (or, on PTE Core, listening or speaking). Per second spent, it is close to the cheapest task on the test. The question is nine seconds long at most, your answer is one word, and there is no preparation phase — you can drill forty of them in the time one Retell Lecture takes.
Do not build a study plan around it if your weak skill is writing or reading. On PTE Academic it contributes nothing to either. A candidate who needs three more points in writing and spends a week memorising short-answer lists has picked a task that is structurally incapable of helping. That is not a matter of efficiency; the marks simply do not go there.
And even in the best case, it is five or six points out of 65 to 75 questions. It is worth having for free. It is not worth panicking about.
The failure mode is the window, not the vocabulary
Here is the thing that costs candidates items they actually knew.
Ten seconds sounds generous. It is, if you answer immediately. It is not if you spend four of them deciding whether the better word is coastline or shore, then start a sentence to buy thinking time, then land on the noun as the microphone closes.
A correct answer that arrives after the recording window has closed scores exactly the same as no answer at all. This is not a Pearson-specific rule; it follows from the shape of the task. The test captures an audio file, and whatever is not in the file did not happen.
Three consequences worth internalising:
One clear word beats a hedged sentence. "Coast" is a complete answer. "I think it would probably be called the coastline, or maybe the shore" is four extra seconds of risk for zero extra credit — the trait is a single Vocabulary point, and it is already yours the moment the right word is on the tape.
Hesitation is the expensive habit, not ignorance. The candidates who lose these items are usually not the ones who did not know the word. They are the ones who knew two words and spent the window choosing. Pick the first acceptable one and stop.
Do not talk yourself out of an answer. There is no negative marking on this question type, so a guess costs nothing. Silence and a guess score identically when the guess is wrong, and the guess sometimes scores a point.
What a machine has to do with a one-word answer
Pearson does not publish its scoring algorithm, and anyone who tells you they know it is guessing. But you can reason about the parts that any automated scorer must have, because they follow from the format rather than from the vendor.
An audio file arrives. Before any judgement about whether the answer is right, the audio has to become text. Only then can the text be compared against the accepted answers for that item.
That two-step order resolves a contradiction you will find on almost every page about this task, where the tips section tells you pronunciation matters and the FAQ tells you it does not. Both are half right, and the order is the reason. Pronunciation is not a scored trait here — the score guide lists one trait, Vocabulary, worth one point. But if the word you said is not recognised as the word you meant, the content check never gets a chance to match it. Clarity is a precondition, not a criterion. Mumbling costs you the item without ever costing you a pronunciation mark, because there is no pronunciation mark to lose.
What our engine does, specifically
This part is ours, not Pearson's, and we label it that way deliberately.
Hilingo's scorer awards the point when an accepted answer — including its alternates — appears as a whole word in what was transcribed. There is no partial credit and no near-miss credit. In our own comparison runs against thirteen scored recordings of three items:
| Candidate said | Expected | Our engine | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| "ghost our coast line" | coast / coastline | 1 | the accepted word is present, surrounding noise is ignored |
| "beach" | coast / coastline | 0 | a sensible answer, not an accepted one |
| "psychiatrist" | psychiatrist | 1 | exact |
| "psychiatric" | psychiatrist | 0 | a near word is not the word |
| "match my" | match / lighter | 1 | whole-word match inside a longer utterance |
Two practical lessons fall out of that table, and they hold regardless of whose engine is marking.
First, extra words around the right word do not hurt you. "I think it is a coast" contains coast. It is slower, which is the real risk, but it is not penalised.
Second, an answer that is merely in the right area earns nothing. Beach for coast is not a rounding error to a machine, it is a different string. This is why the useful practice is producing the exact common noun quickly, not demonstrating that you understood the question.
Practice items, grouped by field
Pearson does not publish the question bank. Every list you find online — this one included — is assembled from what test takers remember, so treat it as a sample of the kind of question, never as coverage. The bank is larger than any list and it rotates.
That is exactly why grouping by field beats an alphabetical dump. You are not trying to memorise sixty answers. You are trying to make a whole semantic neighbourhood fast to reach, so that an unseen item in the same neighbourhood comes out in two seconds instead of seven.
Science and materials
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| What is the frozen form of water called? | Ice |
| What do we call an animal that eats only plants? | Herbivore |
| Which gas do humans need to breathe in order to live? | Oxygen |
| What is the study of living things called? | Biology |
| What force pulls objects towards the Earth? | Gravity |
| What instrument is used to measure temperature? | Thermometer |
| What do we call water in its gas form? | Steam / vapour |
| What is the centre of an atom called? | Nucleus |
| What do we call a scientist who studies stars and planets? | Astronomer |
| What do bees produce? | Honey |
Geography and the natural world
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| What do we call a large area of land covered with trees? | Forest |
| What is a mountain that erupts called? | Volcano |
| What is the imaginary line around the middle of the Earth called? | Equator |
| What do we call a long period with no rain? | Drought |
| What do we call the place where the sea meets the land? | Coast / coastline |
| What do we call a very large mass of slowly moving ice? | Glacier |
| What do we call a large body of water surrounded by land? | Lake |
| What is a sudden shaking of the Earth's surface called? | Earthquake |
People and jobs
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| What do we call a doctor who treats mental illness? | Psychiatrist |
| Who would you visit about a problem with your teeth? | Dentist |
| What do we call a person who designs buildings? | Architect |
| Who treats sick animals? | Vet / veterinarian |
| What do we call someone who studies the past? | Historian |
| Who flies an aircraft? | Pilot |
| Who writes news reports for a newspaper? | Journalist / reporter |
| What do we call a person who cannot hear? | Deaf |
Everyday objects
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| What do you use to light a stove? | Match / lighter |
| What do you use to unlock a door? | Key |
| What do people carry to stay dry in the rain? | Umbrella |
| What do you write with on a blackboard? | Chalk |
| What do you look into to see your own reflection? | Mirror |
| What do you use to cut paper? | Scissors |
| What appliance keeps food cold in a kitchen? | Fridge / refrigerator |
| What do people wear to correct weak eyesight? | Glasses / spectacles |
Time, number and measurement
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| How many days are there in a leap year? | 366 |
| What do we call a period of one hundred years? | Century |
| How many sides does a triangle have? | Three |
| Which is the first month of the year? | January |
| How many minutes are there in an hour? | Sixty |
| What do we call a period of ten years? | Decade |
| What do we call the middle of the day? | Noon / midday |
| Which season comes after summer? | Autumn / fall |
Places and buildings
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Where would you go to borrow a book? | Library |
| Where do you go to catch a train? | (Train) station |
| Where are medicines sold? | Pharmacy / chemist |
| Where would you go to see paintings on display? | Gallery / museum |
| Where does a judge work? | Court |
| Where would you stay while travelling if you have no house there? | Hotel |
| Where would you go to post a letter? | Post office |
| Where are aircraft kept and repaired? | Hangar |
Food and the body
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| Which organ pumps blood around the body? | Heart |
| Which organs do you use to breathe? | Lungs |
| What do we call the first meal of the day? | Breakfast |
| What do we call a person who does not eat meat? | Vegetarian |
| What is bread mainly made from? | Flour / wheat |
| What do we call the bones running down the back? | Spine / backbone |
| Which sense do you use your nose for? | Smell |
| What do we call the liquid pressed from oranges? | (Orange) juice |
University and study
| Question | Answer |
|---|---|
| What do we call money awarded to a student to pay for study? | Scholarship / grant |
| What do we call the talk a lecturer gives to students? | Lecture |
| What is the long piece of research written for a degree called? | Thesis / dissertation |
| What do we call the list of sources at the end of an essay? | Bibliography |
| What do we call the first degree taken at university? | Bachelor's / undergraduate |
| What do we call a student who has finished a degree? | Graduate |
How to practise this properly
The transferable skill is fast retrieval, not coverage. Practise accordingly.
- Answer out loud, always. Reading a list and thinking the answer trains nothing. The item is won by producing a sound within a window.
- Give yourself a five-second ceiling, not ten. If you train at the real limit you will fail at the real limit. Train at half of it and the test feels slow.
- Say one word and stop. Deliberately practise ending the answer. The habit of trailing into a sentence is what eats the window.
- Work a field at a time, then shuffle. Ten geography items in a row is warm-up. The real drill is a shuffled set, because that is the retrieval the test asks for.
- Practise it as a listening task. On PTE Academic that is literally the skill it feeds. If you are missing items because you did not catch "erupts" or "reflection", no answer list will fix that — the problem is upstream of the answer.
- Write down every item you knew but answered too slowly. Those are your real misses, and they are invisible if you only track right and wrong.
See which skill this is actually worth fixing
None of the above tells you whether five or six listening points matter for your profile. That depends on which of your four scores is the low one, and a self-assessment will not tell you.
Hilingo gives you one full scored PTE mock free, with no card. There are 45 full PTE Academic mocks and 45 section tests per section (30 and 30 on PTE Core), and single-question practice mode alongside them — so you can drill Answer Short Question on its own instead of sitting a three-hour mock to reach six items. Objective questions come back with the reason the answer was wrong and the evidence sentence quoted, speaking and writing are marked per criterion rather than as one number, and any question can be displayed in 50 languages if the English of the prompt is getting in the way of the English being tested.
- PTE marks distribution — the full task-to-skill map for Academic and Core, with page numbers
- What is PTE Academic? — why the recording window decides so many marks
- PTE Academic vs PTE Core — check which test's scoring map applies to you
- Why PTE templates do not work — the Content-zero gate on the tasks that do feed speaking
Frequently asked questions
How many short answer questions are there in PTE?
Five to six on PTE Academic, according to Pearson's Test Taker Score Guide. Each is worth one point, scored correct or incorrect with no partial credit, so the whole task type is five or six points across a test of 65 to 75 questions.
How many seconds do you get to answer a PTE short question?
Ten seconds. Pearson's own test format pages give the prompt as 3 to 9 seconds long and the time to answer as 10 seconds, on both PTE Academic and PTE Core. Pages claiming you have three seconds have confused the length of the question with the length of your answer window.
Is PTE Answer Short Question scored on pronunciation?
No. The score guide lists a single trait for this item — Vocabulary, worth one point — and Pearson's format page states that your speaking skills are not tested by this question type on PTE Academic. But clarity still matters for a different reason: any automated scorer has to turn your audio into text before it can check the answer, so a word that is not recognised cannot be matched. You lose the item, not a pronunciation mark.
Does Answer Short Question affect my PTE speaking score?
On PTE Academic, no — it is scored for listening only. On PTE Core it is an integrated item scored for listening and speaking together, so the same point lands in both skills. This is one of the real differences between the two tests, and it is why advice copied from an Academic guide can misdirect a Core candidate.
Can I get a list of all PTE short answer questions?
No, and be suspicious of anyone selling one. Pearson does not publish the bank, so every list online is reconstructed from what test takers remember and the bank rotates. Use a list to learn the kinds of questions and to build retrieval speed in each subject area, not as coverage you can complete.
What happens if I answer with a full sentence instead of one word?
Nothing is deducted for the extra words — if the accepted answer appears in what you said, the point is scored. The risk is the clock. A sentence takes longer to start and longer to finish, and an answer that lands after the recording window closes scores the same as silence. One word, said immediately, is the lower-risk answer every time.