PTE Reading: Multiple Choice, Choose Multiple Answers
A passage with several options, more than one of which is correct. This is the item with negative marking: each wrong selection cancels a correct one, so the score for an item can fall to zero but not below.
Select only what you can justify
Two correct selections and no wrong ones score two. Two correct and two wrong score zero. The arithmetic makes caution strictly better than coverage, which is the reverse of how most candidates have been trained by other tests.
- Read the question stem carefully — it narrows what counts as correct.
- Judge each option independently against the passage.
- Select an option only if you can point to the lines supporting it.
- Leave anything you are merely inclined towards.
The usual distractors
- True but not stated in the passage — the most common and the most tempting.
- Overstated — the passage hedges, the option asserts.
- Right words, wrong claim — heavy vocabulary overlap is a warning sign, not a signal.
- Partly correct — one clause supported, one not. That is a wrong option.
There is no stated number of correct answers. Assuming "probably two" is how candidates end up selecting a third they cannot justify.
Multiple Choice, Multiple Answers — FAQs
2 questions
No. The minimum for an item is zero.
It is not stated, which is why each must be judged on its own.
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Sources
Written from the test board's own published material and checked on 1 October 2026.