Filtering Practice by Difficulty and Topic

Filter Chips on Every Practice Page

Each module practice page (Speaking, Writing, Reading, Listening) has a row of filter chips above the question list. They let you narrow the bank instantly so you spend time on the items that match your study goal.

Difficulty Tags

Easy: shorter prompts, common vocabulary, straightforward answers. Good for warm-ups and confidence-building.
Medium: the bread-and-butter of real PTE. Average prompt length, exam-realistic difficulty.
Hard: long prompts, dense academic vocabulary, edge-case grammar, tricky distractors.

Difficulty is set by our content team based on test-taker average scores, item discrimination, and Pearson's own difficulty bands.

Topic Filtering for Predictable Questions

Some question types — Re-tell Lecture, Describe Image, Essay, SST — are tagged by topic (environment, technology, education, healthcare, economics, society, science). The topic filter is most useful for:

Essay practice: rotate topics so you have a template for every common theme.
Describe Image: work through chart, graph, map, and process types separately.
Re-tell Lecture: get used to academic registers across disciplines.

Recommended Approach

Daily practice (8–10 weeks out): stick to Medium. It mirrors real-exam difficulty so your predicted score stays calibrated.
Plateau-breaker (when score stalls): shift to Hard for two weeks. The discomfort forces a step-change in fluency, vocabulary, and reading speed.
Final week before exam: drop to Easy + Medium mixed with Predicted items. You want confidence and pattern-recognition, not new struggle.
Bad day / low energy: Easy only. Better to maintain the streak than skip practice.

Combining Filters

Filters stack. "Hard + Predicted + Environment" gives you the trickiest predicted essays on environmental topics — perfect for the final exam-week sprint. "Easy + non-Predicted" is a great no-pressure warm-up.

Saving a Filter

Your last-used filter combination is remembered per module, so coming back to Reading tomorrow gives you the same view you left.

Open any module practice page and try a Hard filter — or check your practice history to see which difficulty you have been gravitating toward.