The strategies below help you when you are writing the test.
1. Manage your time.
You have 20 minutes for each reading passage. That’s about 1.5 minutes per question. However, the Reading to Learn questions take longer, so for the multiple choice, you should not take more than 1 minute.
Ideally, you want to go through the questions 3 times:
- Answer any easy questions you know for sure.
- Answer more difficult questions
- Guess
Try to answer questions that take overall knowledge at the end. Wait until the end to do these questions:
- Inference
- Main Idea
- Reading to Learn
Why? Because those three question types take overall knowledge of the reading. You will build that knowledge as you answer the specific detail questions.
2. Follow a logical order for the answers.
Reading questions are in logical order. They follow the passage.
3. Understand how multiple-choice questions are structured.
Most multiple-choice questions follow a similar format. Apart from the correct answer, you often find three common distractors:
Opposite
This is opposite of the correct answer. For example, if the correct answer is “He broke the telephone”, this distractor would be “He fixed the telephone.”
Close
This is the most difficult distractor. It is very close to the right answer, but it has a small difference that makes it incorrect. Look at an example sentence:
- He arrived 10 minutes late, about 5 minutes before Paul.
If the question is “When did he arrive”, the close answer is 5 minutes late. It is in the sentence, but it is not correct.
Not Relevant
These are the easiest answers to eliminate. They can be crazy, funny, or completely unrelated.
Once you know the types of distractor, you should be able to follow similar pattern to find the answers.
- Eliminate the not relevant answer.
- Eliminate the opposite answer.
- Decide between the final two options.
You should be able to choose between two answers every time, even if you don’t understand the question that well.
Let’s look at simple example first:
Question: What is 2+3?
- 6
- 4
- 5
- 10
6 is opposite because you would find that answer if you used multiplication. 4 is close to the answer. 5 is correct. 10 is not related because it is so far from the answer.
Now let’s look at a sample question more like the TOEFL:
Question: In which city was the first protest?
- Chicago
- New York
- Los Angeles
- Canada
Canada is wrong because it is not a city. That’s a not relevant answer. Now imagine the first protest was in New York. That’s the correct answer. The second protest was in Chicago. That would make it the close answer. Los Angeles could be the opposite answer if the reading perhaps talks about how they never protested on the West Coast.
4. Watch out for restrictive words
Certain words in a question can restrict possible answers. Look out for these words:
- Never, always, every, none, all, zero,
More TOEFL Reading Lessons
Ready for more strategies to increase your TOEFL reading score? Try these lessons: