Чтение: Разбор практических заданий на уроке
TOEFL iBT Тема 2 18:44 Английское озвучивание · Английский + китайские субтитры (встроенные)
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The Reading section gives you about thirty minutes and about fifty items. That is much faster than the old test, and the items are shorter, so the skill being tested is not endurance any more. It is speed with accuracy. Three kinds of task appear: Complete the Words, Read in Daily Life, and Read an Academic Passage; the first two are new in twenty twenty-six. The section is adaptive, so the passages you see depend on how you are doing, and you should not read the difficulty of the test as a sign of your performance. You cannot go back to a section once you have left it, so answer every item as you meet it.
There is no penalty for a wrong answer. An item left blank scores exactly what a wrong answer scores: nothing. So never leave an item empty. On a four-option item, a considered guess is right a quarter of the time or better, and even a blind guess beats a blank, which is right never. This is the one piece of test strategy that costs nothing and pays every time: when the clock runs low, fill every remaining item with your best available choice.
Complete the Words gives you a short text with letters or whole words missing, which you supply. This is a test of grammar and vocabulary, not of finding information; you are not hunting through a passage, you are asking what word belongs here. Use the sentence around the gap, because the word class is usually decided before the meaning: after the you need a noun, after very an adjective, after to a base verb. Spelling counts, and a word with a letter missing is a wrong word. When you have filled the gap, read the completed sentence back to yourself. If it does not sound like English, it is not.
Pause and choose. Very intensifies a quality, so the word after it is almost always an adjective: very quiet, very prepared. A noun cannot follow very in that slot, a base verb follows to, and an article begins a noun phrase rather than completing very. These word-class reflexes are the fast layer of the task: they cut the candidate set before meaning and spelling narrow it further.
Read in Daily Life presents emails, notices, timetables, advertisements and other short practical texts. The question is almost always what the reader should do, or what has changed, or what is not allowed. Practical texts hide their key information in small places: a date, a room number, or a word like except, unless, only, from Monday. Those small words carry the answer far more often than the long sentences around them, so train your eye to stop on every condition word instead of skating over it. The text is short, and students who read it too fast answer from memory of a similar text. Read the one in front of you.
Watch the register of daily-life texts. An email from a tutor is polite and indirect, and that politeness can hide an instruction. You may wish to consider means do this. It would be helpful if you could is an instruction, not a comment. When you meet these soft phrases, underline the action they carry, because the question will ask about the action, not the tone. But keep the other rule in view as well: some polite offers really are optional, and only the message's own words, like the word optional itself, decide which kind you have.
For the academic passage, skim first, for about thirty seconds, for the shape: what is this about, how many parts does it have, where does the argument turn? Then answer the questions, and scan back for each fact. The topic sentence, usually the first sentence of a paragraph, tells you what that paragraph is for. When a question asks which paragraph contains something, you are matching against topic sentences, not reading everything again. The skim bought you a map; the scan uses it.
A question about a word asks what it means in this passage, not what it means in general, so answer from the sentence, not from your dictionary memory. Guess an unknown word from its parts: a prefix like un, re, or over, and a suffix like tion, able, or ly narrow the meaning and fix the word class before you have understood the root at all. And an inference question asks what the passage lets you conclude, not what it says. The right answer is always supported by a line you could point at. If you cannot point at the line, it is the wrong answer, however reasonable it sounds.
Four habits cost candidates marks in this section. Translating each sentence into Chinese in your head takes two to three times as long as reading it, and at thirty minutes for fifty items there is no room for it; losing that habit takes weeks of reading without a dictionary, not a decision on test day. Subvocalising, saying each word silently, caps your speed at speaking speed, around one hundred fifty words a minute, when you need double that. Hunting for a word from the question fails because the test writes questions in different words on purpose. And perfectionism on one item forgets that every item is worth the same. Use your own error record to find which habit is yours, because the four fixes are different trainings.
Practise with a timer from the first day, because reading well and reading fast are two different skills, and only one of them is trained by reading slowly. Read one academic page and one practical text every day, a science article and an email, a history page and a noticeboard, since the section now asks for both. Build vocabulary from the Academic Word List, but learn each word in a sentence, because a word you have only met on a flashcard is a word you will not recognise inside a line of prose. After every practice set, write down why each wrong answer was wrong: misread question, missed word, out of time, unknown vocabulary. Four different problems need four different fixes, and only your own list tells you which one you have.
A library notice says that books are due on Friday unless your receipt gives a later date. A student returns a book on Friday without checking the receipt. The student may have met the deadline, but has not used all the information, because the receipt might have allowed a later date. That is the mood of this whole practice supplement: reading means joining details and conditions, not recognising a familiar word. All the passages, questions and answers in it are newly written teaching examples, not official E T S items or rated forms, and their lengths and clocks are classroom choices. Try each set before reading its answers, and keep the text visible while you work. The official reading description says the needed information is in the text; you do not need specialist knowledge, and an answer must fit the particular text in front of you.
In Complete the Words, use the supplied letters and the surrounding sentence together. Grammar suggests possible forms, and meaning and spelling narrow the choice further. Text A tells of students measuring, m e a, the temperature of two campus paths at the same time, t i. One path was exposed to direct sunlight, and the shaded path was cooler at every reading, so the comparative c o o fits. However, they could not conclude that shade was the only cause, because the study did not control wind speed or surface material. They planned, with a double n, to repeat the measurements with those differences checked. Note the traps: shown does not form a complete verb after results, coolest needs more letters than the gap supplies, and planed, single n, is a different word that does not fit this meaning.
Text B describes a college library's digital collection of local photographs. Students can search it by street name or year. Each image has a short description, d e s plus eight letters, but some dates remain uncertain, u n c plus six. The library asks users to provide evidence before suggesting a new date, which helps staff revise the information without treating every guess as a fact. The words connect: uncertain dates need evidence before revision. Do not select each word as if it appeared alone on a vocabulary card, and notice how a word family serves different slots: describe the action, description the thing, descriptive the modifier. The supplied letters, the length and the sentence must all fit at once.
Pause and choose. The sentence compares two paths, at every reading, so the comparative cooler fits, and the supplied letters c, o, o match it exactly. Coolest would need more letters and a different comparison, more than two things. Cooling changes the word class. And read the completed sentence back: the shaded path was cooler at every reading sounds like English, which is the final check the original notes ask for.
The original notes offer quick word-class hints, and this supplement checks them against real sentences. The shortcut says the is followed by a noun, but the quiet room inserts an adjective, and the carefully prepared report adds an adverb before the adjective. The shortcut says to takes a base verb, and they plan to repeat the study agrees, but they walked to the library uses to as a preposition, and they look forward to reading needs the whole expression, where reading fits. Do not turn every word after to into a base verb. Prefixes suggest meaning: uncertain means not certain, repeat means do again. But a word part alone does not prove the answer; verify the whole sentence and preserve the spelling of the actual word.
Here is the original email. The workshop still starts at two p m on Wednesday. It has moved from Room eighteen to Room twenty-one, because the projector in Room eighteen is being repaired. Please bring a printed draft unless you uploaded your final draft before noon on Tuesday; if you uploaded it after noon, bring a printed copy too. You may wish to bring a notebook for your own notes, but this is optional. Notice the structure of the conditions: one exception with a time boundary, and one polite offer that the message itself labels optional. Question seventeen asks the main purpose: to explain a room change and what participants should bring. Not a new day, not a cancellation, and not a request that participants repair a projector.
Jia uploaded a final draft at one p m on Tuesday. One p m is after noon, so the exception does not apply, and Jia must bring a printed draft. The distractors fail in instructive ways: only-a-notebook and nothing-because-any-upload ignore the time boundary on the exception, and a replacement projector invents a job the email never assigns. On the notebook, the email explicitly says optional, which answers the question directly: it is a useful choice for personal notes, not a requirement, not a replacement for the draft, and not something to upload. Polite wording can introduce a request, a suggestion or an option, and the message's own words, like optional, tell you which one you have.
The notice and timetable work as a pair, and each carries half the answer. From the sixth of October, afternoon appointments take place in the library annex, while morning appointments stay in Room four, and everyone brings an appointment confirmation. Walk-in questions run from twelve fifteen to twelve forty-five, and booked meetings do not run during that period. The prose explains the change; the table helps you locate a period quickly, and you need both, because a true phrase in one cell is not enough if it belongs to the wrong time.
Question twenty asks where a student attends a ten a m booked meeting on the seventh of October. Ten a m belongs to the morning booked period, which stays in Room four; option B wrongly applies the afternoon change to every meeting, and option C invents a choice of location. Question twenty-one asks who can use the service at twelve thirty without a booking: that falls inside the walk-in window, so a student with a walk-in question. Question twenty-two asks what remains unchanged: the word stay signals that the morning location is the same as before. The common failure across all three is reading one true phrase and skipping the time it belongs to.
The academic passage compares two ways of collecting seeds from a local wildflower. In the first method, volunteers picked seeds from the earliest plants to flower. In the second, they returned several times and collected from plants flowering at different dates, because the group wanted a collection representing the variation already present in the local population. The first method was convenient, since volunteers could finish in one visit; however, it risked leaving out plants that flowered later. The second required more visits but sampled a wider range of flowering dates. Researchers explained that neither method creates new variation; collection determines which existing plants are represented. The trial recorded dates and plants visited, rather than testing later survival, so its results support a claim about the breadth of collection, not a claim that one batch grows better. Notice the structure: aim and methods, comparison, then evidence limits and next step. A paragraph's job matters even when its first sentence is not a complete summary.
Walk the harder answers with the passage open. Question twenty-five asks what it refers to in however, it risked leaving out plants that flowered later. The previous sentence describes the first method as convenient, and however introduces its drawback, so it is the first collection method; follow the connected idea. Question twenty-six asks what breadth means in this passage: the range of plants included in the collection, since the paragraph contrasts breadth with survival; the physical-width choices borrow the word from another context. Question twenty-seven is the inference: picking from only the earliest flowers may represent flowering dates less widely than repeated visits do. It connects two stated facts without adding a result the trial never measured. Question twenty-eight asks why the writer mentions the separate growing trial: to distinguish a future survival test from the completed collection comparison. The figure shows the point: repeated collection visits include a wider range of flowering dates. Compare which existing plants are included before making any claim about survival.
Pause and choose. The pronoun it takes its referent from the connected idea: the previous sentence's subject is the first method, and however introduces that method's drawback, leaving out later-flowering plants. The growing trial has not been mentioned yet at that point in the passage, new variation is what collection does not create, and a late-flowering plant is exactly what gets left out, not what does the leaving. Referent questions reward following the paragraph's thread, not matching nouns by shape.
The original notes give fixed reading speeds and broad claims about learners; use your own error record instead, because different learners need different support. A dictionary check or a brief translation during review can explain a word you missed, and it does not itself prove that you cannot read under test conditions. For a first practice round, allow four minutes for text A and three for text B, four minutes for the email and notice together, then five for the academic passage. These are classroom clocks, not official limits or a score prediction. If you finish quickly but choose answers without evidence, review accuracy before reducing the clock; if you run out of time, identify where the time went, decoding words, rereading conditions, or comparing options. During review, write a short evidence phrase beside each answer, and remember that scored Reading items carry a maximum of one raw point each, while unscored items, adaptive routing and scale conversion remain separate issues. Do not calculate the number of later questions one minute here will cost you; follow the real test's navigation and timing instructions.
Pause and check both. First, no, the does not always require a next-word noun: the carefully prepared report inserts an adverb and adjective between. Second, no, politeness cannot make an explicitly optional notebook compulsory; the message's own word, optional, decides. The supplement's other checks follow the same spirit: to can be an infinitive marker or a preposition; the seed-collection passage cannot support a survival claim; outside knowledge cannot replace the passage's evidence; and remembering this worksheet's answers is not the skill, which is why the last answer says: attempt new texts and explain their evidence. Change the task to practise the skill beyond this worksheet.