The TOEIC part by part

The TOEIC Listening & Reading test is two hours, 200 questions, seven parts. Knowing that breakdown is not the point. The point is that each part runs on its own clock. The first four are paced by the recording whether you like it or not. The last three are paced by you, and that is where most points are lost.

The seven parts at a glance

Listening runs 45 minutes, Reading 75 minutes. Those two numbers are nothing alike. The 45 minutes are not a budget — they are the length of the tape. The 75 minutes are a budget you allocate yourself, and allocating it badly costs more than any gap in your vocabulary.

Parts 1 to 4: the time is not yours

The recording plays once. It does not come back, it cannot be paused, and a question you miss is gone the moment the next one starts. Every listening strategy follows from that single constraint.

Parts 1 and 2: nothing is printed

In Part 1 only the photograph is printed; the four statements are spoken. In Part 2 nothing at all is printed — not the question, not the three replies. This is the part candidates discover on test day, and the one where practising on a site that shows you the text is worthless: it removes precisely the difficulty being measured.

Parts 3 and 4: read before you listen

Here the questions are printed, and that is your only advantage. Use it: read all three questions during the instructions, before the conversation starts. You then know what to listen for — a figure, a place, a reason — instead of trying to hold everything. Answer while the audio runs, not after: once the next item begins it is too late, and being one question behind propagates through the whole block.

A Part 3 conversation very often opens with a request, followed by a refusal. The reason for the refusal comes immediately after, and it is almost always what one of the three questions asks about.

Parts 5 to 7: 75 minutes to allocate

A budget that works, and that most preparation courses recommend in one form or another:

What the table means is one sentence long: Part 5 pays for Part 7. Every minute saved on incomplete sentences is a minute handed back to the only place where time is genuinely short. A candidate spending a minute per question in Part 5 reaches Part 7 twenty minutes behind and leaves fifteen questions blank — far more points than the care ever earned.

The twenty-second discipline

In Part 5, if the answer does not present itself within twenty seconds, it will not present itself at the fortieth. Mark your best option and move. Many of these questions are settled without reading the whole sentence: when the four options are four forms of the same word (inform, information, informative, informed), the question is about grammar, and the position of the blank is enough.

Part 7 is read backwards

Reading the whole passage and then hunting for answers means reading it twice. Read the questions first, then scan the document for what they ask. In a double or triple passage at least one question always crosses two documents; it is identifiable in advance, and it is the only one that requires reading both.

Where the points actually go

• Part 2, because no word is written down and the distractors play on near-identical sounds (Where / Wear).
• The end of Part 7, not through difficulty but through running out of time.
• Part 5, on easily confused pairs and preposition collocations, neither of which can be improvised.

All three are trained separately, which is why this site offers each part on its own before the full test.

To turn a number of correct answers into a score, how the TOEIC is scored explains why the conversion is not a simple rule of three.