About the exam.....Preliminary English Test (PET)
Reading & Writing (1 hour 30 minutes- 50% of the total mark)
There are five Reading parts. The tasks involve:
There are three Writing parts. The tasks involve:
There are five Reading parts. The tasks involve:
- answering multiple-choice questions on five short texts
- matching descriptions of people to short texts
- answering true/false questions about a longer text
- reading a long text and answering multiple-choice questions that test understanding of different things such as writer opinion
- doing a multiple-choice cloze task (a text with gaps and you need to choose the right option to fill in each gap).
There are three Writing parts. The tasks involve:
- sentence transformations (completing a sentence so that it has the same meaning as another sentence)
- writing a short message to communicate some information
- doing a longer piece of writing – either a story or an informal letter.
Listening (About 30 minutes-25% of the final mark)
The Listening paper has four parts and the tasks include:
The Listening paper has four parts and the tasks include:
- answering multiple-choice questions on short listening texts and on a longer monologue (one person speaking) or interview
- completing a gap-fill while listening to a monologue
- answering true/false questions on a dialogue (two people speaking).
Speaking (About 10-12 minutes- 25% of the final mark)
The Speaking test has four parts:
The Speaking test has four parts:
- In the first part the examiner asks the candidate ‘getting to know you’ type questions.
- In the second part candidates talk to each other about a situation.
- In the third part the candidate has to speak for an extended amount of time about a picture.
- In the fourth part, the candidates interact with each other again, discussing themes from Part 3 of the test.
NB. You don’t need to pass all three papers in order to pass the whole exam. For example, if you do very well in Reading & Writing and Listening, but you don’t do so well in Speaking, it is still possible to pass the exam. You need 70% to pass!
PET has two passing grades:
Pass with Merit
Pass
and two failing grades:
Narrow Fail
Fail
‘Pass’ ordinarily corresponds to approximately 70% of the total marks, and ‘Pass with Merit’ to approximately 85%. A ‘Narrow Fail’ result indicates that a candidate was within 5% of the ‘Pass’ boundary.
Statements of Results contain a graphical display of a candidate’s performance in each component. These are shown against a scale of Exceptional – Good – Borderline – Weak and indicate the candidate’s relative performance in each paper.
If you pass Cambridge English: Preliminary, you will receive the Preliminary English Test certificate at Level B1. If you do exceptionally well at the exam, you will receive a Preliminary English Test certificate that says that you showed ability at Level B2. If your performance is below B1 level, but you show ability at A2 level in the exam, you will receive a Cambridge English certificate stating that you demonstrated ability at Level A2.
SPEAKING PART- Tips to prepare it!
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