TOEFL Read the Passage practice
Read a short academic passage and answer multiple-choice questions. 1 passage per set, 5-minute timer.
Urban Heat Islands
Cities often register temperatures several degrees higher than the surrounding countryside, creating what ecologists call urban heat islands. Dark roofs…
How Bees Navigate
Honeybees travel surprising distances to find flowers, yet they rarely get lost. To orient themselves, they rely on the sun as a moving compass, trackin…
The Printing Revolution
Before the mid-fifteenth century, European books were copied by hand, a slow process that made them rare and costly. Johannes Gutenberg's introduction o…
Coral Bleaching
Coral reefs owe their brilliant colours to tiny algae that live inside the coral's tissue. These algae photosynthesize and pass most of the resulting en…
Sleep and Memory
For a long time sleep was viewed as a passive shutdown, but research now shows the sleeping brain is hard at work. During deep sleep, the brain replays…
The Story of Tea
Tea began as a medicinal drink in ancient China and only gradually became an everyday pleasure. Legend credits its discovery to leaves drifting into a p…
Volcanic Soil
Few places seem less welcoming than the slopes of an active volcano, yet farmers around the world deliberately settle there. The reason lies in the ash.…
The Invention of Money
Long before coins existed, people exchanged goods directly, trading grain for cloth or tools for livestock. This barter system worked among neighbours b…
Animal Migration
Each year billions of animals undertake journeys that dwarf any human voyage, crossing oceans and continents with astonishing precision. Arctic terns fl…
The Library of Alexandria
The ancient Library of Alexandria aimed at nothing less than gathering all the world's knowledge under one roof. Founded in Egypt more than two thousand…
About the TOEFL Read the Passage task
Read an Academic Passage is the classic TOEFL reading task: a short text on a university subject — ecology, history, urban planning — followed by multiple-choice questions. Each set has one passage, about five questions and a 5-minute timer.
The question types repeat: vocabulary in context ("closest in meaning to"), factual detail, negative fact ("all of the following EXCEPT"), inference and the purpose of a sentence or paragraph. You don't need background knowledge; everything is answered by the passage.
Common mistakes: picking the dictionary meaning of a vocabulary word instead of its meaning in that sentence, choosing an answer that is true but not stated, and re-reading the whole passage for every question. Read once for the main idea, then return only to the sentence each question points to.
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