Daily life texts 1 — a pool notice, a lunch menu and a reminder email

Four short everyday texts at about CEFR B1, with eleven questions of the kinds set on Read in Daily Life, the task type in the reading section of the TOEFL iBT® test that uses short non-academic texts rather than academic passages. The published specification describes these stimuli as the written English of ordinary life, such as a sign, a menu, an email or a social media post, pitched anywhere from A1 to C1; this set sits in the middle of that range.

The texts are a summer notice at a community swimming pool, a text-message thread in which two roommates work out who can let a repair person in, a cafe lunch menu with add-on prices and a vegetarian mark, and a reminder email from a dental office. Each is printed in full inside every question about it, so you never need to scroll back to find it.

The questions train the skills the specification lists for this level: finding the main purpose of a brief message, locating a specific detail in information laid out as a list or a menu rather than as sentences, working out what a pronoun such as "he" refers to in a chat, and reading the clipped, verbless wording of a notice. Two items turn on an exception, such as a weekday rule that changes what the opening hours seem to say, and one asks what the notice does not allow. One item asks you to count the hours between a phone call and an appointment before deciding whether a cancellation fee applies.

The wrong options are built the way they usually are on short texts: from words that really appear in the text, recombined into something it does not say.

This material is offered as a quiz and as a set of flashcards. The flashcards carry the everyday expressions the texts actually use, each with its meaning in that context, so you can review them after the quiz or on their own.

On test day the reading section is adaptive, the texts stay on screen beside the items, and each item is worth one point. Here the texts are printed inside each question instead, every answer comes with an explanation that names the words that settle it and says why the other options fail, and you can repeat the set as often as you like. It is practice for the task type, not a simulation of a scored test, and it does not predict a score.

Every text and question here is written by Zestly. No ETS test material is reproduced, the businesses and people in the texts are invented, 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.

• Find the main purpose of a short everyday message such as a reminder email
• Locate a specific detail in information laid out as a list, a menu or a set of opening hours
• Work out what a pronoun refers to in a text-message thread
• Read the clipped, verbless wording of a notice and apply its exceptions
• Identify what a notice does not allow by checking each option against the text
• Combine two details (a time and a notice period, a price and an add-on) before answering

Practice material written by Zestly, based on the ets.org description of the TOEFL iBT Reading task Read in Daily Life (test revised January 2026).