Finishing the TOEIC reading section

The problem with the TOEIC reading section is almost never a problem of English. It is a problem of arithmetic: 100 questions, 75 minutes, 45 seconds per question on average. Except the questions do not cost the same amount of time, and the average is the worst possible guide.

The budget that holds

Keep one checkpoint from that table: at 20 minutes, Part 6 must be behind you. It is the only marker worth watching, because you can check it at a glance and there is still time to correct course.

Part 5: settle it in twenty seconds

A Part 5 question is answered in one of two ways, and you need to know within a second which one applies.

Grammar questions — 10 seconds

When the four options are four forms of the same word — inform, information, informative, informed — the question is not about meaning. It asks what kind of word goes in the blank. Look at what comes immediately before and after, not at the rest of the sentence. An article in front means a noun; room for an adverb means an adjective.

Vocabulary questions — 25 seconds

When the four options are four different words of the same kind, you have to read the whole sentence: meaning decides, often through a collocation (comply with, responsible for). If the right word does not come, mark one and move. These cannot be deduced; they are either known or not.

A candidate who gives back 10 minutes on Part 5 hands them to Part 7, where they are worth roughly ten extra questions attempted. It is the best trade available anywhere on the paper.

Part 6: read the paragraph, not the sentence

Part 6 looks like Part 5 and does not behave like it. Since the 2016 revision, one of the four blanks in each passage asks you to insert a complete sentence, and several others depend on a tense or a connector used elsewhere in the text. Answering without having read the whole paragraph is guessing on those items.

Part 7: the only part where time genuinely runs out

Read the questions first

Reading the document in full and then hunting for answers means reading it twice. Read the questions, note what they want — a figure, a date, an intention — then scan the text for it. The answers almost always appear in the order the questions do.

Spot the question that crosses two documents

In a double or triple passage, one or two questions require combining two sources: an advertisement and the email replying to it, a price list and an invoice. They are recognisable from their wording (What is suggested about…, What will Mr. Tan most likely do…). Those are the only ones that justify reading both documents; the rest are answered from one.

Know when to abandon

A question that resists for more than a minute is worth the same point as an obvious one. Mark something, note it, move on. Abandoning costs one point; persisting costs three questions never read at the end of the section.

The last five minutes

Reserve them for one thing only: making sure no answer is blank. With no penalty for a wrong answer, guessing on fifteen unattempted questions returns three or four correct ones on average. Those are free points, and they are the ones rushed candidates forget to take.

To turn correct answers into a score, the 10–990 scale gives the estimate, and how the score is calculated explains why it stays an estimate.