Academic passage 1 — reading a tree's rings
One short academic passage, written for this exercise, with ten questions of the kinds the reading section of the TOEFL iBT® test sets on academic text — and the passage printed beside every one of them, as the real test keeps the stimulus on screen while you answer.
The passage explains how the width of a tree's annual rings is used to reconstruct past growing conditions, how overlapping patterns in living and dead wood extend that record back thousands of years, and why a narrow ring shows that something limited growth without showing what. No knowledge of botany or climate science is needed or rewarded; every answer is on the page.
The ten items cover main purpose, two specific details, an inference, the purpose of a particular part of the text, what a reference phrase points back to, two vocabulary-in-context items, the relationship between two ideas, and one question asking which statement the passage does NOT support. The wrong options are built the way real ones are: statements that are perfectly true of real forests but are never made by this passage, details recombined from words that do appear in it, and a qualification restated as an outright failure. Each explanation quotes the words that settle the item and says why the closest wrong reading fails.
Note on length: under the specification in force since January 2026, reading texts run from short messages up to around 200 words. If you have been practising on 700-word passages, you have been practising on the previous version of this test.
This passage and these questions are 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.
TOEFL iBT® is a registered trademark of ETS. This product is not endorsed or approved by ETS.
- Identify the main purpose of a short academic passage without mistaking its first detail for its point
- Locate a specific detail that is stated rather than one that merely sounds plausible
- Draw an inference that the text supports, and reject one that goes beyond it
- Explain why a writer includes a particular sentence or closing qualification
- Work out what a reference phrase such as "that shared pattern" points back to
- Infer the meaning of an academic word from the sentence around it
- Describe how two ideas in a passage are related and which the writer ranks higher
- Answer a NOT-supported question by confirming the three options that are stated
"A ring records the conditions that constrained growth, and in a wet region growth may be constrained by temperature rather than by rainfall. A narrow ring is evidence that something was wrong, not evidence of what." — from the passage, written for this exercise.
Sample question
Passage: "Every year a tree adds a layer of new wood beneath its bark. In temperate climates that layer is not uniform: the wood formed in spring is pale and open, the wood formed later in the season is dark and dense, and the boundary between one year's dark wood and the next year's pale wood shows as a ring. Counting the rings therefore gives the age of the tree. Their widths give something more useful. A year of good growing conditions produces a wide ring, a year of drought a narrow one, and because all the trees in a region experience the same weather, the sequence of wide and narrow rings is shared across them. That shared pattern can be matched between a living tree and a dead one that overlaps with it in time, and then between that dead tree and an older one, extending the record backwards for thousands of years. The method has a limit that is easy to overlook. A ring records the conditions that constrained growth, and in a wet region growth may be constrained by temperature rather than by rainfall. A narrow ring is evidence that something was wrong, not evidence of what." What is the main purpose of the passage?
- Warning that the age of a tree cannot be established by counting its rings.
- Explaining how tree rings are used to build a record of past growing conditions, and noting a limit of that method.
- Arguing that tree rings are the most reliable record of past climate.
- Describing how a tree produces new wood over the course of a year.
See the answer
Explaining how tree rings are used to build a record of past growing conditions, and noting a limit of that method.
The passage does two things: it explains how ring widths build a record of past growing conditions, and it closes by naming a limit of that method. The claim that rings are the most reliable record is never made, since the passage compares the method to nothing else. Describing how a tree produces new wood is only the first sentence, not the point of the whole. And the passage states plainly that "Counting the rings therefore gives the age of the tree", so the option denying that is contradicted outright.