Complete the Words 2 — "goed", glaciers and printed spelling

Complete the Words supplies 30 of the 50 reading items on the TOEFL iBT® test as revised in January 2026, according to the published specification. It is machine scored and aims at CEFR levels from B1 to C1 and above. What it measures is whether you can rebuild an academic text: which word belongs in a partly missing space, in which form, judged from word order, vocabulary and the sense of the sentence.

This is the middle set of the three in this category, pitched at B2–C1. Its three original paragraphs, each about 80 words, come from linguistics (why young children say "goed" after they have already used "went"), geology (how a glacier turns a V-shaped river valley into a U) and the history of printing (how printed books slowly fixed English spelling, sometimes after the pronunciation had moved on). The first sentence of each paragraph stays whole and four later words lose their endings. Every item prints the whole paragraph, so you judge each gap in context.

The items move beyond the basics. You separate the present perfect ("have extracted") from a noun of the same family, a progressive verb that takes an object ("is imitating the speech") from an adjective that cannot, a participle used as an adjective ("exposed bedrock"), an adverb of time placed before a verb that is already there, a relative-clause verb that must agree with a plural subject and match the past tense, and a past passive ("had been fixed"). In one item all four options are nouns that fit the grammar, and only meaning decides. Each explanation names the clue that settles the gap and says why each of the other words fails.

How this differs from test day: on the test you type the missing letters yourself. Here each damaged word comes with four complete words to choose from, all beginning with the letters you can see, and the underscores never tell you how long the word is. Recognizing the right word among four is easier than producing it, so use the explanations to find the forms you hesitate over, then cover the options and try to write each word from its visible letters before you look.

The flashcards hold twelve words and phrases from the three paragraphs, such as "revealing", "bedrock" and "ironically", each with its meaning as used there. The material offers the quiz and the flashcards.

Every paragraph and item here is written by Zestly. No ETS test material is reproduced, and facts about the test format are paraphrased from the published specification rather than copied from it.

TOEFL iBT® is a registered trademark of ETS. This product is not endorsed or approved by ETS.

• Tell a past participle in a perfect or passive verb from a noun or adjective of the same word family
• Recognize when a gap takes a direct object and therefore must be a verb
• Use a participle such as "exposed" as an adjective before a noun
• Place an adverb of time or manner before a verb the sentence already has
• Make a relative-clause verb agree with its subject and with the tense of the main clause
• Choose between four grammatical nouns by meaning alone

Practice material written by Zestly, based on the ETS specification of the TOEFL iBT reading task Complete the Words (revised test, January 2026).