Fill in the Blanks (Reading) gives you a short passage with gaps and a shared bank of words to drag in. It's short, needs only local reading, and every blank is scored on its own. This lesson covers how to narrow the options quickly and how to build the vocabulary the task really depends on.
How the task works
FIB-R is the fourth task in the official Reading order. You get a passage of about 80 words with 3–5 gaps and a shared word bank below it. Pearson's instruction is to drag words from the box to fill the gaps, and it states: "There are more words than gaps so you will not use all the words provided." So a bank of six to eight words serves three to five gaps. Some words are always distractors, and each word can go in only one gap. For the time budget across all Reading tasks, see Reading overview and timing.
Don't confuse this with Reading & Writing Fill in the Blanks (next lesson), where each blank has its own drop-down list and blanks don't affect each other. That difference changes your order of work:
- FIB-R: fill the blank you're most sure of first. Every word you place removes it from the options for the other blanks.
- R&W FIB: work through the blanks in order; they're independent.
One point per correct blank, with no deduction for wrong answers, so never leave a blank empty.
Word class is the first filter, not the answer
Start by asking what kind of word the gap needs:
| Clue around the gap | Word class needed |
|---|---|
| After a / an / the | Noun |
| After a preposition (of, in, for) | Noun or -ing form |
| After is / are / was | Adjective or past participle |
| Modifying a verb | Adverb (often -ly) |
| Between subject and object | Verb, agreeing with the subject |
| Near a time marker (yesterday, by 2020) | Verb in the matching tense |
Music helps with mathematics and physics. … Music courses ____ in schools just as other courses are.
Before the gap is the plural subject "Music courses"; after it, "in schools". So you need a verb. Then voice: courses are provided by schools, so the passive are offered, not the active "offer".
What word class actually does. Because the bank has more words than gaps, some words can't fit a given gap at all, and word class rules them out at a glance. That saves time; it doesn't give you the answer.
When it doesn't help. If the remaining candidates are the same word class, skip this step. That's very common, because distractors are usually chosen to match. In the next lesson's official example, all four options (still, already, ever, yet) are adverbs.
Then, in order:
- Collocation: which preposition does the word take? Does it sit naturally with the nouns and verbs around it?
- Meaning: put it in and read the sentence. Does it say what the passage is actually saying?
- Register: does the word match the tone of the passage? An academic text won't suddenly use a casual word.
Specific to FIB-R: balance the bank. Because the bank is shared, placing your surest word first removes it from the rest. So work by confidence, not by position in the text.
Collocations: examples, not a list to memorise
A collocation is a word's habitual partner, such as the preposition a verb or adjective always takes. These are often impossible to guess from translation. Some examples from academic texts:
| Collocation | Meaning | Example |
|---|---|---|
| pay the price for | suffer the cost of | Rural areas pay the price for urban pollution. |
| take part in / participate in | join in | We support every student in taking part in sports. |
| associate … with | connect in the mind | We associate fables with childhood. |
| have access to | be able to use | Everyone had access to the same information. |
| have an impact on | affect | These factors may have lasting impacts on a child's chances. |
| depend on | be decided by | It depends mainly on two factors. |
| blame … on | say something caused | They closed the department, blaming it on market forces. |
| fall short of | fail to reach | Sales fell short of expectations. |
| run counter to | go against | The finding runs counter to earlier ideas. |
| provide insights into | help explain | The study provides new insights into basic questions. |
| account for | make up; explain | Exports account for half of revenue. |
| be subject to | be affected by | Prices are subject to change. |
| be rooted in | come from | The custom is rooted in local history. |
| in terms of | regarding | In terms of cost, the plan works. |
| prior to | before | Register prior to the event. |
Why not memorise a list? Pearson's own Academic Collocation List for PTE contains 2,469 collocations, drawn from a 25-million-word academic corpus. A table of 15 or 30 covers about one percent of that; relying on it to match the dozens of blanks across both fill-in-the-blanks tasks won't work. The point of the table is the habit: whenever you learn a word, learn its preposition with it.
Vocabulary is the real lever
Most wrong blanks aren't "I know the word but not its preposition". They're "I don't really know this word, or its distractor". Reading research commonly cites that understanding a text needs about 95% of its words to be familiar, which takes roughly 4,000–5,000 word families, and about 98% for comfortable reading, roughly 8,000. PTE Core texts are general academic and workplace English, so that's the range to aim for. This is a general research finding, not a PTE standard or a score conversion.
A practical way to build it (a practice tip):
- Start from what you read, not from word lists. After each fill-in-the-blanks item, pick out the words you weren't sure about, not just the one you got wrong. Usually two to five.
- Record three things for each word: its meaning, the preposition or phrase it usually goes with, and the sentence you found it in.
- Record its word family: offer, offered, offering; restore, restoration. Many distractors in R&W FIB are forms of the same root.
- Review weekly. A word counts as learned when you can recall it from its meaning and use it in a sentence.
- Expect steady volume. Three to five items a day at two or three new words each adds up to 200–300 words a month, all words you've actually met, which stick far better than list words.
If you recognise every option but still can't choose, your issue isn't vocabulary size but telling close words apart. The next lesson's blank-by-blank method is for that.
Close reading, not memorised answers
Practise with intensive reading (a practice tip):
- Understand the whole passage, and be able to say why each answer is right, not just what it is.
- Don't memorise answers. The item bank is large, and when a passage does reappear, its options may have changed. "This one is B" breaks the moment a distractor changes.
After each item:
- Before checking, explain your choice: word class, collocation or meaning?
- Check the answer. If wrong, identify which step failed.
- Read the completed sentence aloud. Wrong collocations usually sound wrong.
For every miss, write one line: "Blank __, answer __, I chose __, the step that failed was (word class / collocation / meaning), next time check __ first."
Practice checks
- Work through 15 FIB-R items using word class first, then collocation and meaning. Use the Reading: Fill in the Blanks question bank.
- Each day, close-read three to five fill-in-the-blanks items and log your uncertain words with meaning, partner words, source sentence and word family.
- Label every miss and read the completed sentence aloud.
Check: across ten new items in a row, average 0.5 wrong blanks or fewer per item, with no item at 2 or more, and be able to give the grammar or collocation reason for each choice. If you're not there, use the diagnosis table in the Reading overview to see whether the gap is word class, collocation or vocabulary. Each needs different work.
Worked check, the music example: word class (a verb is needed) → form (passive, plural: are offered) → meaning. When you see "subject + gap + prepositional phrase", use that order instead of guessing by feel.