Here are Top 3 frequently asked Summarize Spoken Text questions in recent PTE Academic test (January 2021).

1. Luxury Brand

The question today of what makes a luxury brand, a luxury brand and how do we distinguish it, is very hard to answer. The standard business response is to say they are more exclusive. And we get exclusivity by having high price and relatively small amounts of the product available. The reality, however, of luxury brands is that they are sold in their millions, and in some cases, are not priced that much higher than the standard output. The only way I can really answer your question is to say, it is all relative. As you said in your introduction, it wasn’t that long ago in Australia that we would have considered two televisions to be a luxury, or even further back, one colour television. And you can make a strong argument, for example, that Starbucks in China, right now, is a luxury purchase because of its cost, because of how frequently it is purchased by many people. So, I think the long answer is a complicated one, but the answer is, it depends who you talk to. I think in the business community what we would say, is that there is a small cluster of more expensive brands which have a distinct strategy that we would identify as being luxury brands. And they start with the Rolls Royce and the Tiffanys and the Louis Vuittons of the world. And, I think that tends to be how we see them.

2.English Language

English, as you have already read, is not a pure language. I don’t think there really are any pure languages in the world. But English is definitely not a pure language. English, in fact, has borrowed from over 350 languages in its history. So it’s a variety of many languages. Some people say it’s like a dog, a mongrel dog, a dog that has been made up of many different dogs. The English language is like that. By looking at the history of the English language we learn about the history of the English people. The two things are closely connected. So, in fact, today we are not only learning about language but we are learning about history. The fact that English has borrowed words from over 350 languages has been viewed differently throughout history. So for example in Shakespeare’s time people were very angry about words which were not, they thought, original English words – words which came from other languages, they didn’t like them.

3. Market Economy

Within most developed countries, notions of pragmatism, notions of the fact that we have democracies, have succeeded in tempering the market economy. In the 19th century, 18th century, the Industrial Revolution has a very negative effect on people, particularly working classes all over the world. We see data where life expectancy was reduced, hikes we were reduced, we were looking at the medical record. We can see that actually, living standards, much among large fractions of population, actually went down. But eventually, we pass the legislation about working conditions. And eventually, we circumscribe some of the worst kinds of behavior. We eventually, in the 20th century, we put regulations that composed better environmental conditions. And so some of the damage was reversed, and that we have made the market economy work and ways that the benefits of the all is far more what we shared in the world a hundred years ago.