HOW TO SCORE HIGH IN THE TOEFL READING

TOEFL Reading often becomes a big issue for most of the students due to one big problem that is lack of time. Time is one major drawback in TOEFL reading .There is very less time to read and answer all the questions. Due to lack of time students often get stressed and panic and that messes up the entire reading section. There are overall 3 or 5 passages which are academic topics and you have around 20 minutes to read and answer all the questions. It may sound easy but when you really try it out you will realize how challenging it can be.

Another issue is that the passages are full of details and information so it becomes even more difficult to remember all the information and answer all the questions.

Let us take a small example of a passage:-

In southwest France in the 1940’s a few children while playing suddenly disclosed a series of narrow chambers which had a lot of prehistoric paintings of animals. All the colors in the paintings were derived from Ocher and other iron oxides ground into a fine powder. Some colors were blown or sprayed and some were brushed or smeared on rock surfaces. It is quite a possibility that tubes made from animal bones were used for spraying because hollow bones some stained with pigment were found nearby.

This is just a small part of the actual TOEFL passage. So try and analyze in how much time you read the above lines. Maybe approximately around 2 minutes, however the real passage in TOEFL is at least 5 times bigger and we can observe there is a lot of information, facts, that need to be read carefully. Since if you want to answer the questions correctly you will also have to read carefully.

So it can be safely concluded that you may need around 10 minutes to read the passage and then you have to answer 12-14 questions and you have only around 10 minutes for that. So you can see how pressurizing this can get. The most important thing is how much of information in the passage can you memorize. So you may have to keep going back to the passage to answer the questions which will consume even more time.

Another thing to remember is that there are 5 passages, so the pressure even increases and to remember and memorize the information in all the five articles can really get very difficult, so we can see that it is all a time game. So initially you may handle it but as the number of passages keep on increasing it may start getting difficult.

Let us analyze the normal procedure that students follow when they need any answer:

• First step is to read the question

• Ten the second step is to go the passage

• The third step is to find the answer or information that we require

·      And the last is to go back to the question and then eliminate the wrong answers and select the right one.Logically this entire process of finding the right answer will take at least 3-4 minutes.  3-4, minutes just for finding one answer is really too much.

Hence the biggest obstacle in this exam is time. Due to lack of time students are unable to attempt all the questions even though they may be having a lot of knowledge. Hence they leave questions unanswered.  Hence it is very sad that we just let go of our marks so easily only due to lack of time.

We must remember that out future depends on this exam and we must focus in time management in such exams.

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