Here are Top 3 frequently asked Summarize Written Text questions in recent PTE Academic test (August 2020).

1.Wine Industry in US

In 1920, the Eighteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution was enacted, creating yet another serious setback to the American wine industry. The National Prohibition Act, also known as the Volstead Act, prohibited the manufacture, sale, transportation, importation, exportation, delivery, or possession of intoxicating liquors for beverage purposes, and nearly destroyed what had become a thriving national industry. In 1920 there were more than seven hundred wineries in California. By the end of Prohibition, there were 160.

If Prohibition had lasted only four or five years, its impact on the wine industry might have been negligible. But it continued for thirteen years, during which time grapes went underground literally and figuratively, becoming an important commodity in the criminal economy. The fruit juice, which was sometimes made into concentrate, was ideal for making wine. Some of this yield found its way to bootleggers throughout America who did just that. But not for long, because the government stepped in and banned the sale of grape juice, preventing illegal wine production. Vineyards stopped being planted, and the American wine industry ground to a halt.

2.Books and Television

To understand the final reason why the news marketplace of ideas dominated by television is so different form the one that emerged in the world dominated by the printing press, it is important to distinguish the quality of vividness experienced by television viewers from the “vividness” experienced by readers. I believe that the vividness experienced in the reading of words is automatically modulated by the constant activation of the reasoning centres of the brain that are used in the process of cocreating the representation of reality the author has intended. By contrast, the visceral vividness portrayed on television has the capacity to trigger instinctual responses similar to those triggered by reality itself – and without being modulated by logic, reason, and reflective thought.

The simulation of reality accomplished in the television medium is so astonishingly vivid and compelling compared with the representations of reality conveyed by printed words that it signifies much more than an incremental change in the way people consume information. Books also convey compelling and vivid representation of reality, of course. But the reader actively participates in the conjuring of the reality the book’s author is attempting to depict. Moreover, the parts of the human brain that are central to the reasoning process are continually activated by the very act of reading printed words: Words are composed of abstract symbols – letters – that have no intrinsic meaning themselves until they are strung together into recognizable sequences.

Television, by contrast, present to its viewers a much more fully formed representation of reality – without requiring the creative collaboration that words have always demanded.

3.Tree Ring

Here’s how tree-ring dating, known to scientists as dendrochronology works. If you cut a tree down today, it’s straightforward to count the rings inwards, starting from the trees outside (corresponding to this years growth ring), and thereby to state that the 177th ring from the outermost one towards the center was laid down in the year 2005 minus 177, or 1828. But its less straightforward to attach a date to a particular ring in an ancient Anasazi wooden beam, because at first, you don’t know in what year the beam was cut. However, the widths of tree growth rings vary from year to year, depending on the rain or drought conditions in each year.

Tree-ring specialists (known as dendrochronologists) proceed by noting the sequence of wider and narrower rings in a tree cut down in a known recent year, and also noting the sequences in beams from trees cut down at various times in the past. They then match up and align the tree ring sequences with the same diagnostic wide, narrow patterns from different beams.

In that way, dendrochronologists have constructed tree-ring records extending back for thousands of years in some parts of the world. Each record is valid for a geographic area whose extent depends on local weather patterns because weather and hence tree growth patterns vary with location. For instance, the basic tree-ring chronology of the American Southwest applies (with some variation) to the area from Northern Mexico to Wyoming.