PTE Bank team analysed the most frequently asked PTE questions which are repeatedly showed in recent PTE exams (October – November 2019), and here are recently asked PTE Fill in the Blanks (Reading Task).
1. Nightjar
The nightjar’s soft plumage and variegated colouring help it blend in with its surrounds, but it is the bird’s own judgement in choosing the most sympathetic background that makes it a camouflage champion.
Each bird chooses where to nest based on its specific patterns and colours, says camouflage researcher Martin Stevens, of the Centre for Ecology and Conservation at the University of Exeter in Cornwall. “Each individual bird looks a little bit different,” he says. “This is not a species-level choice. Individual birds consistently sit in places that enhance their own unique markings, both within a habitat and at a fine scale with regards to specific background sites.”
2. Population Change
Populations can change through three processes: fertility, mortality, and migration. Fertility involves the number of children that women have and is to be contrasted with fecundity (a woman’s childbearing potential). Mortality involves the causes, consequences and measurement of processes affecting death in a population. Demographers most commonly study mortality using the Life Table, a statistical device which provides information about the mortality conditions (most notably the life expectancy) in the population. Migration refers to the movement of persons from an origin place to a destination place across some pre-defined political boundary. Migration researchers do not designate movements as migrations’ unless they are somewhat permanent. Thus demographers do not consider tourists and travelers to be migrating. While demographers who study migration typically do so through census data on place of residence, indirect sources of data including tax forms and labor force surveys.
3. Human Remains
In 1959, the partial skeletal remains of an ancient woman estimated to be 10,000 years old were unearthed in Arlington Springs on Santa Rosa Island, one of the eight Channel Islands off the southern California coast. They were discovered by Phil C. Orr, curator of anthropology and natural history at the Santa Barbara Museum of Natural History. The remains of the so-called Arlington Springs woman were recently reanalyzed by the latest radiocarbon dating techniques and were found to be approximately 13,000 years old. The new date makes her remains older than any other known human skeleton found so far in North America.
The discovery challenges the popular belief that the first colonists to North America arrived at the end of the last ice age about 11,500 years ago by crossing a Bering land bridge that connected Siberia to Alaska and northwestern Canada. The earlier date and the location of the woman’s remains on the island adds weight to an alternative theory that some early settlers may have constructed boats and migrated from Asia by sailing down the Pacific coast.
4. Lumiere
Our sense of cinema as a site of commercial entertainment can be traced back to the Lumière brothers. In December 1895 they attracted a fee-paying public in Paris to sit and watch flickering images on an illuminated screen. The commercial Pandora’s Box they opened was to blossom in a few years into a world cinema industry and, at its peak, the fantastical Hollywood. Yet in the 30 years in which this miraculous construction was accomplished, audiences rarely had to listen to films, only watch them. Hence, the early decades of cinema were characterized by the title silent. In fact, there was a lot of noise, machinery, audiences, musicians and commentators. Even so, the absence of the human voice and dialogue make the films seem rather strange when viewed by a modern audience.
5. Dictatorship
Dictatorship is not a modern concept. Two thousand years ago, during the period of the Roman Republic, exceptional powers were sometimes given by the Senate to individual dictators such as Sulla and Julius Caesar. The intention was that the dictatorship would be temporary and that it would make it possible to take swift and effective action to deal with an emergency. There is some disagreement as how the term should be applied today. Should it be used in its original form to describe the temporary exercise of emergency powers? or can it now be applied in a much broader sense as common usage suggests?
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