Post category:Exam Tips / Fill in the Blanks (Reading)
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Here are Top 3 frequently asked Fill in the Blanks (Reading) questions in recent PTE Academic test (September 2020).

1.Mechanical Engineering

Mechanical engineering was at the heart of Taylor’s theorizing, providing the context for its development, the world view by which it was sustained and, finally, the justification for its widespread application. Scientific management aimed to analyse and control the activities of people in the same way that, engineers analysed and controlled machines. Central to Taylor’s system was the desire to rationalize and standardize production techniques in the interests of economy, efficiency and mutual prosperity. His primary point of interest was the individual worker pursuing individual goals and motivated by incentive payments. Undoubtedly Taylor’s view of human motivation was somewhat simplistic and his apprehension of the significance of groups limited and generally negative.

2.Substitute

While workers worry about whether robots will take their jobs, teachers are wondering how to use education to insulate the next generation from such a fate. This has worked before. When the last wave of automation swept the developed world at the start of the 20th century, policymakers decided education was the answer. If machines were going to substitute for brawn, they reasoned, more people would need to use their brains. The US invested heavily in education, with good results. Workers reaped the benefits through better jobs and higher wages. Economists Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson summed it up like this: “The industrial revolution started a race between technology and education — and, for most of the 20th century, humans won that race.”

3.Standard English

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, the relationship between standard and nonstandard language is, evidently, still an uncertain one. We are at a transitional point between two eras. We seem to be leaving an era when the rules of Standard English, as selected and defined by prescriptive grammarians, totally conditioned our sense of acceptable usage, so that all other usages and varieties were considered to be inferior or corrupt, and excluded from serious consideration. And we seem to be approaching an era when nonstandard usages and varieties, previously denigrated or ignored, are achieving a new presence and respectability within society, reminiscent of that found in Middle English, when dialect variation in literature was widespread and uncontentious (Chapter 9). But we are not there yet. The rise of Standard English has resulted in a confrontation between the standard and nonstandard dimensions of the language which has lasted for over 200 years, and this has had traumatic consequences which will take some years to eliminate. Once people have been given an inferiority complex about the way they speak or write, they find it difficult to shake off.