By Sameer, lead instructor at Precise PTE.
Read Aloud contributes to both speaking and reading, which makes it the single highest leverage task in the test. It is also the easiest task to practise badly, because reading a text out loud feels productive even when nothing is improving.
Use the preparation time to chunk the text, not to read it silently at speed. Mark natural pauses at commas and clause boundaries. Three to five chunks is usually right for a sixty word text.
When the microphone opens, start within one second. Silence at the beginning is treated as hesitation. Keep a steady pace of roughly 140 words per minute; slower feels safer to you but reads as unnatural to the engine.
If you misread a word, do not go back. Self correction costs more fluency marks than the original error costs pronunciation marks. Finish the sentence and move on.
The three habits that cost the most marks: trailing off at the end of a sentence, over stressing every word to sound clear, and skipping the final s on plurals and third person verbs.
Record yourself daily for two weeks and compare the first and last recording. Fluency is a motor skill. It improves with repetition, not with theory.