Quizzes, exams, and flashcards about Read in Daily Life: Daily life texts 3 — tone, idiom and what a message really asks, Daily life texts 1 — a pool…← TOEFL iBT® practiceThe short, non-academic texts the reading section actually uses — a notice, a menu, a sign, an email, a message thread — with the text beside every question.

What this task type asks of youThis is the second of the two text-and-questions reading task types on the TOEFL iBT® test, and it is the one people skip. It carries roughly 5 to 15 items, aims at the CEFR range from A1 to C1, and is machine scored at one point an item — the same point as an item on a demanding academic passage.What it measures is plain: whether you can read the short, everyday written English of ordinary life. The published specification names the kinds of stimuli — a sign, a menu, an email, a social media post — and the texts can be very short indeed, a few dozen words at the easier end.Short does not mean easy. At the lower levels you are expected to find the main purpose of a brief message, recognize what a pronoun refers to, and read information laid out as a table, a list or a form rather than as sentences. You are also expected to cope with the clipped, verbless register of a notice or a timetable. Higher up, you are expected to identify a writer's purpose inside a piece of correspondence and to catch informal and idiomatic language.Where the marks goThree things account for most errors on short texts:

A detail that is nearly right. With fifty words on screen, wrong options are built from words that are genuinely in the text, recombined into something it does not say.

Register and intent. A message can be a request, a complaint, a reminder or an apology, and the difference is carried by a couple of words rather than by the content.

Telegraphic text. "No entry after 18:00 except permit holders" has no verb to lean on, and the exceptions are where the questions are set.

How these materials workEach material is a set of short everyday texts written for this exercise and printed in full inside their questions, with items on purpose, specific detail, what a pronoun refers to, what is implied by tone, and what a notice does not permit. The explanation names the words that settle it.The flashcards carry the everyday and idiomatic vocabulary these texts run on, which is a different word list from the academic one.Every text 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.TOEFL iBT® is a registered trademark of ETS. This product is not endorsed or approved by ETS.

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