Quizzes, exams, and flashcards about Read an Academic Passage: Academic passage 1 — reading a tree's rings, Academic passage 2 — the railways and the…
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Academic passages with the text kept beside every question, and the vocabulary from each one on flashcards.
This is one of the two reading task types on the TOEFL iBT® test that work from a text you read and answer questions about. It carries roughly 5 to 15 items on a given form, aims at the CEFR range from B1 to C2, and is machine scored at one point an item.
What is being measured is whether you can follow an academic text: its central idea, the details that support it, what it implies without stating, how one idea stands in relation to another, and how the writer has organized the argument. Subject knowledge is not measured. You are never expected to know the topic in advance, and every answer is on the page.
These passages are short. This is what most people get wrong when they arrive from older preparation. Under the specification now in force, reading texts run from brief messages of a few dozen words up to roughly 200 words for the more demanding ones. The 700-word, three-passage reading paper belongs to the version of the test used before January 2026. Difficulty is calibrated with an automated text-complexity tool rather than by eye, and the published bands correspond to about a grade 10–11 reading level for medium texts and grade 11–12 and above for the harder ones.
The text stays visible the whole time. The specification is explicit that reading stimuli remain on screen while you answer, so nothing here is a memory test.
Reading is delivered as a two-stage adaptive section: a router of roughly 18 to 21 minutes, then a lower or upper module of about 9 minutes, chosen by how the router went. You cannot tell which module you are in, and some items are unscored trial items.
Each material is one passage written for this exercise, printed in full inside every question, with items on main idea, specific detail, inference, the writer's purpose, how two ideas relate, and vocabulary in context. The explanation says why the key is right and why the closest wrong option fails — on inference and purpose items that second half is the entire skill, because the wrong options are usually true statements that the passage does not actually make.
The flashcards carry the academic vocabulary from the passage, so the words you met in context come back without it.
Every passage and question here is written by Zestly. No official test material is reproduced, and facts about the test format are paraphrased from the published specification rather than copied from it.
Zestly is an independent study tool. It is not affiliated with ETS, which owns TOEFL and TOEFL iBT, and it is not a test centre.
TOEFL iBT® is a registered trademark of ETS. This product is not endorsed or approved by ETS.
