Toefl - Reading 2

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Detail

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To score high, you must follow strategy to get to the right information that will lead you to the right answer.

1) Read the question to understand what information you are being asked to find.

2) Identify the key words in the question to search for in the reading.

3) Start reading quickly from the beginning of the paragraph in search of the key words or synonyms of them.

4) When you find the key word, remind yourself of the question and read carefully to find the answer for yourself without looking at the answer choices. 60% of the answers will be found in the sentence with your key words. 30% will require you to read 1 sentence above or below the sentence with your key word. 10% will require you to read 2 sentences above or below the sentence with your key word.

5) Once you have identified the answer, check the answer choices and choose the one that matches your anticipated answer best.

Front 2

Negative Detail

Back 2

To score high, you must follow strategy to get to the right information that will lead you to the right answer. In these questions, it’s best to go back and forth between the reading and the answer choices.

1) Read the question to understand what information you are being asked to find.

2) Identify the key words in the question to search for in the reading.

3) Start reading quickly from the beginning of the paragraph in search of the key words or synonyms of them.

4) When you find the key word, read the sentence to understand if what you learned answers the question or eliminats an answer.

5) Check the answer choices to determine which you can eliminate or which is the answer.

6) Continue to do this for each answer choice until you can determine which one is wrong or not mentioned and choose that answer.

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Inference

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Inference questions are difficult. They usually contain the words infer, imply, or suggest in the question.

The strategy is the exact same as that for detail questions except that when you read the sentence with your key word, you must make a jump from it with respect to content. For example, if you read:

30% of apples are green.

What does that mean? Well, a detail question just asks how many apples are green: 30%. An inference question asks what can you infer about apples:

70% of apples are not green.

Now, you didn’t read that but you can infer it from the information, right? That’s the idea behind an inference question and that’s why they often cause the most trouble to students. Here's the strategy to follow to make them as easy as possible for you.

1) Read the question to understand what information you are being asked to find.

2) Identify the key words in the question to search for in the reading.

3) Start reading quickly from the beginning of the paragraph in search of the key words or synonyms of them.

4) When you find the key word, remind yourself of the question and read carefully to find the answer for yourself. Ask yourself, what does this imply that must be true (remember the apple example)? 60% of the answers will be found in the sentence with your key words. 30% will require you to read 1 sentence more. 10% will require you to read 2 sentences more to find the answer.

5) Once you have identified the answer, check the answer choices and choose the one that matches your anticipated answer best.

6) If you don’t find the answer right away, keep asking yourself: what must be true from this sentence that isn’t stated directly. (Remember the apple example.)

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Pronoun

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Another question type is pronoun. Pronoun questions don’t appear often and they always ask you what a certain word refers to.

1) Determine whether the pronoun is singular or plural.

2) Identify all of the nouns in the sentence before the pronoun that match in number (singular or plural)

3) Choose the one that fits the meaning of the sentence best.

4) Find that noun among your answer choices and choose it.

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Plugin

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These questions follow a few simple steps. Often, you'll find your answer before reaching the final step of our strategy. This question can become relatively easy if you master and memorize this strategy. If you don't, it can be one of the hardest on the TOEFL reading.

Beware: if you have to get to the last step in our strategy when answering one of these questions, you’re dealing with a tough example of plug-ins, so watch your time and work through the final steps of strategy carefully.

1) Read the sentence carefully to identify what it’s saying and the key words within it.

2) Read the paragraph and find the sentence (or sentences) that contains the key words or synonyms of them.

3) If that’s not enough to find the answer (which it's not in our case because we still have 3 choices possible: A, B, and C) and your sentence contains pronouns, use them to help you determine where your sentence belongs.

4) If that’s not enough to find the answer, determine whether your sentence contains connecting adverbs such as however, consequently, therefore, etc. If it does, use these connecting adverbs to determine whether your sentence continues the idea its about or begins the idea. Then, choose the answer that makes the most sense.

5) If that’s not enough to find the answer, determine whether your sentence is discussing something in a general or specific way. In the academic English that you will find on the TOEFL, general sentences appear before specific sentences.

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Paraphrase

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1) Read the entire sentence in bold quickly to get a general idea of what it means.

2) Read the main independent clause and nothing else. Make sure to identify and understand its subject, verb, and object.

3) Read through the answer choices and eliminate any answer that does not state this information from the main clause.

4) Read the next most important clause in the highlighted sentence carefully.

5) Read through the answer choices and eliminate any answer that does not state this information exactly.

6) Continue this process until only one answer is left.

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Purpose

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Purpose questions have two classes.

Type 1:

It asks you why the author mentions or states a word, phrase, or sentence in the reading. These are the more common ones that follow strategy well and tend to be easier. Here’s an example.

Why does the passage mention in paragraph 5 the fact that the exact extent of groundwater resources is still unknown?

Here’s the idea behind the strategy. In standard, academic writing in English, there stands a very strong structure. Titles provide the topic of the entire reading. Paragraphs are groups of sentence that develop one piece of information or idea about the title. How do they develop these ideas? The first sentence is the topic sentence that outlines the focus of the paragraph. Every sentence after it continues the idea by providing more detail about the previous sentence. In other words, every sentence continues the idea before it. That’s why our strategy is as follows:

1) Read the question to understand what you’re being asked.

2) Identify the key words.

3) Read the appropriate paragraph and find those key words or synonyms of them.

4) Read the sentence with your key words and understand that the purpose of it is to explain the sentence that came before.

For example, the question will ask, “Why does the author mention apples?” You look for apples in the reading. Find it and then read the sentence before and say to yourself, “the reason the author mentioned apples was to explain the content in this sentence before.”

5) Look for any adverbs that will help you to identify the relationship between the sentence with your key words and the sentence before it.

Continuing our example with apples. If between the two sentences, we have the adverb “however.” The purpose of the author’s words was to contrast the information in the sentence before.

6) Choose an answer choice that reflects the information in the sentence before.

Type 2:

Purpose of a paragraph strategy:

1) Remind yourself of the structure of the reading by reviewing or re-reading the first sentence of every paragraph

2) If step 1 doesn't clearly illustrate the answer, read the first sentence of the paragraph that you're being asked about again and remember that the purpose of the paragraph is to describe that first sentence.

3) If step 2 doesn't clearly illustrate the answer, read through the paragraph and determine its focus by what the majority of the paragraph discusses (this is a tough step and that's why this is generally a tough question).

These questions are a challenging class because they more than any other question I've seen require you to comprehend the reading and its structure at a high level.

Structure, type 1, and type 2

There are many important structural concepts to understand to master the TOEFL reading. These basic, structural concepts create the foundation for all of the strategies that you're learning. Below is a video that touches on these concepts while reviewing paraphrase strategy.

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Summary

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1) Review the structure of the reading on your own by reminding yourself what each paragraph was about.

2) Read the summary question carefully and see if the sentence in bold gives you a clue as to what the answer choices might be. If your sentence in bold states something about 3 theories, it’s easy to know that you must choose 3 answer choices among the 6 that describe 3 theories mentioned in the reading.

3) Read your first answer choice to understand what it states and find its key words.

4) Scan through the reading until you find the key words or synonyms of them and read the sentences they are found in.

5) Determine whether that answer choice is a summary, detail, or wrong answer. Use the following method to do so.

(1) If an answer choice is a summary, the answer choice restates information found within the topic sentence of the paragraph, the first sentence. That’s a good choice.

(2) If the answer choice deals with a sentence that is not the first, it is a detail. It is therefore not a good choice. You must choose answers that summarize important points in the passage and not just minor points mentioned in one sentence that is not the topic sentence.

(3) If the answer choice describes content that is not found in the reading or is wrong according to the reading, of course, eliminate it.

6) After your analysis, you should be left with 3 summary answer choices. They will be your answers.

7) If you are left with 4 summary answer choices, read the sentence in bold in the question and eliminate the answer choice that doesn’t directly deal with the topic sentence.

8) If you are left with 2 summary answer choices and 2 detail answer choices, read the sentence in bold in the question and eliminate one of the detail answer choices that deals with the sentence in bold least.