The Putonghua Proficiency Test or Putonghua Shuiping Ceshi (PSC) is an official test of spoken fluency in

Standard Chinese Standard Chinese ()—in linguistics Standard Northern Mandarin or Standard Beijing Mandarin, in common speech simply Mandarin, better qualified as Standard Mandarin, Modern Standard Mandarin or Standard Mandarin Chinese—is a modern standa ...

(Mandarin) intended for native speakers of

Chinese languages The Sinitic languages (漢語族/汉语族), often synonymous with "Chinese languages", are a group of East Asian analytic languages that constitute the major branch of the Sino-Tibetan language family. It is frequently proposed that there i ...

. The test was developed in October 1994 by the

Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China The Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China is a cabinet-level department under the State Council of the People's Republic of China, State Council responsible for basic education, vocational education, higher education, and othe ...

, the Institute of Applied Linguistics at

Beijing Language and Culture University } Beijing ( ; ; ), Chinese postal romanization, alternatively romanized as Peking ( ), is the Capital city, capital of the China, People's Republic of China. It is the center of power and development of the country. Beijing is the world's Li ...

and the State Administration of Press, Publication, Radio, Film and Television. Specified standards of achievement in the test are required for many jobs in broadcasting, education and government.

Content

The test consists of five sections: # Reading 100 monosyllabic words to test pronunciation. (10%) # Reading 100 polysyllabic words to test pronunciation. (20%) # Reading out the correct form from several choices, to test vocabulary and syntax. (10%) # Reading a 400-character passage to test fluency. (30%) # Speaking for three minutes on a topic chosen from two supplied by the examiners. (30%) There are sixty literary selections used in the fourth section of the test, including: * a selection from Jia Pingwa's ('Ugly Rock'), a story about a

meteorite A meteorite is a solid piece of debris from an object, such as a comet, asteroid, or meteoroid, that originates in outer space and survives its passage t