TOEFL Reading Strategies

Level: B2. The TOEFL iBT Reading section is not about long textbook chapters. It uses short, focused texts and three task types, and every answer is contained in the text in front of you. That changes how you should read it. This page shows the format and the strategy that fits each task.

By the end of this page you can…

…name the three Reading task types, budget your time across 50 items, and apply the right reading skill — skimming, scanning or tracing ideas — to each one.

What the Reading section looks like

Reading comes first in the test: 50 items in about 30 minutes. It is multistage adaptive, so how you do on the first part decides the difficulty of the second part (ETS). The texts are concise and focused, and a key principle runs through all of them: all the information you need is in the text, and you do not need prior knowledge of the topic (ETS).

Task 1: Complete the Words — read for word families

In Complete the Words you see a short paragraph where parts of some words are missing, and you type the missing letters. It tests whether you can process a text for both meaning and form (ETS). The fix is vocabulary depth: knowing a word’s full spelling and its family (decide, decision, decisive) lets you complete it from the few letters and the surrounding sense.

Task 2: Read in Daily Life — skim for purpose

These are short, non-academic texts you meet in real life: notices, menus, schedules, emails, messages, signs, adverts and the like, each followed by two or three multiple-choice questions (ETS). The skills being measured are skimming and scanning, finding the main purpose, handling informal or idiomatic language, and making inferences from brief, telegraphic text.

Here is an illustrative example in that style:

Library notice: Returns box relocated to the main entrance during renovation. Staffed desk closed until 9 March. Online renewals unaffected.

Main purpose? To tell readers where to return items while the desk is closed — not to advertise, not to charge a fee.

Read for why the text exists before you read for detail. One scan to grasp the purpose, a second to find the specific answer, and you are done.

Task 3: Read an Academic Passage — trace the ideas

The academic passages are short — about 200 words — and expository, drawn from fields such as history, art and music, business and economics, life science, physical science and social science (ETS). Each is followed by five questions that may ask about factual information, vocabulary in context, inference, the relationship between ideas, and the purpose of part or all of the text.

A reliable routine: read the whole passage once for the main idea; for a detail question, scan back to the exact sentence; for a vocabulary-in-context question, cover the word and predict a synonym from the sentence; for a purpose question, ask what the writer is trying to do in that part.

Timing across the section

Fifty items in thirty minutes is brisk. Do not sink several minutes into one Complete the Words gap or one hard inference — mark your best answer and move on, because every item counts toward the adaptive path. Save your final seconds to settle any item you flagged.

Vocabulary you’ll meet

Tap a word to hear it. These are the reading skills and terms the section is built around.

Practice

Quick recap before the quiz.

Quiz

Recap cheat-sheet

How to prepare with this course

Reading speed and comprehension grow with regular, timed reading:

• Timed reading: work through the B2 reading practice and the full practice pages.
• Vocabulary depth: the vocabulary sets build the word families Complete the Words relies on.
• Grammar for structure: grammar lessons on linking and clause structure help you trace how ideas connect.
• New to the exams? Start at the English exams hub.

Next

• Rehearse reading: English Reading Practice: Upper-Intermediate
• Build word families: English Vocabulary sets
• Compare the exams: English exams hub
• New here? Start with Start Learning English Here