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TOEFL Fill the Blanks practice

Read a short academic paragraph and complete words with missing letters. 10 blanks per set, 5-minute timer.

Set 01Fill the Blanks

Coral Reefs

Built … tiny … called coral polyps, … reefs … … … time, gradually forming … skeletons that … in … … sunlit water.

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Set 02Fill the Blanks

The Water Cycle

The sun … water from oceans and lakes, … it into vapour that … into the sky. As the air …, the vapour … into droplets, … clouds. Eventually the water ……

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Set 03Fill the Blanks

Bees and Flowers

Bees … from flower to flower in … of nectar. As they …, grains of pollen … to their bodies and are … to the next bloom. This … the flowers, … them to ……

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Set 04Fill the Blanks

Volcanoes

Deep beneath the …, molten rock called magma … under enormous …. When a weak spot …, the magma … upward and … from the volcano as …. Over many …, the co…

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Set 05Fill the Blanks

How Plants Eat

Using … from the sun, green … make their own …. Their leaves … carbon dioxide from the air and … water from the soil. Inside the leaf, these … combine t…

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Set 06Fill the Blanks

The Moon

The moon does not … its own light; it … the light of the …. As it … the Earth, different … of its surface are …, which is why its … seems to change. The…

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Set 07Fill the Blanks

Spider Webs

A spider … silk inside its body and … it through tiny …. It … the sticky threads into a … web, then … nearby and …. When an insect … the web, the spider…

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Set 08Fill the Blanks

Mountains

Mountains … when huge plates of the Earth's crust … into each other. The … folds and … the rock upward over millions of …. Once formed, the peaks are sl…

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Set 09Fill the Blanks

Rainforests

Rainforests … more kinds of life than any other … on land. Tall trees … a thick green roof that … most of the sunlight, leaving the … floor dim. Countle…

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Set 10Fill the Blanks

The Heart

The heart is a … that … blood around the body. Each …, it squeezes to … fresh blood through the …, carrying oxygen to every …. Tired blood then … to the…

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About the TOEFL Fill the Blanks task

In this Reading task — Complete the Words on the updated TOEFL iBT — you read a short academic paragraph in which several words are cut off. The first letters of each word are given and you supply the rest. Each set has 10 blanks and a 5-minute timer.

It tests vocabulary and grammar together. The letters shown narrow the choice, but the sentence decides the form: "grow" or "grows", "slow" or "slowly". The number of missing letters is fixed, which is often the fastest clue.

Common mistakes: completing a word that fits the letters but not the grammar, ignoring the letter count, and working blank by blank instead of reading the whole sentence first. Skim the paragraph once for meaning, fill the blanks you're sure of, then come back to the hard ones.

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