I have passed my TOEFL®!

[Vuralorion]

Hmm... I heard that Verbal section is not very important for foreign students. A friend of mine said that Universities do not consider Verbal section important for foreign students but native students. Nevertheless I will study hard for it as well. I took some mini practice tests for GRE on internet and I think that analogies section will be challenging for me. Therefore, as you said I think the key factor is Vocabulary. So what prep books do you suggest for GRE? Thanks Konstantin.

[Konstantin]

Barron, Bible and Nova are OK.
Some software is necessary too.
I agree with you that analogies are really hard, because there are a lot of ambiguous or simply strange words there.

[Neeshu]

great score I am proud of you awesome surely it seems you learned a lot from this forum. I will too my test is schedules on october 29 for toefl and oct 25 for gre.

[Sensipar]

Hello,

I am new here. I saw your score and you did a great job! Anyway, I just want to ask help regarding TOEFL reading. I had a difficulty understanding the passage, I don't know why but maybe I am quite nervous. I practiced the reading part of Barron but unfortunately I scored only 8/14 per passage( more or less). You got high score at reading so I know you can teach me to improve my score. Thank you so much.

It's me,
Sensipar

[Englishuser]

Hi sensipar,

I just posted some tips in another thread that you may find useful: TOEFL reading and speaking sections. Advice?

All the best

EU

[Sensipar]

EU,

Thanks for the tips. Do you think if I read first the passage I can finish answering the questions? We only have 20 minutes for every passage. You know what it feels taking a test with a limited time. I tried to read every paragraph twice in order to understand but still I can't get the right answer. Thanks again.

It's me,
Sensipar

[Konstantin]

Hello sensipar.
It's not so complicated:
1) Try to read as much as possible. It has been particularly useful for me to read articles in Scientific American or The Economist. They are really interesting; you could expand your vocabulary, take additional ideas for writing and practise reading simultaneously.
2) I think it would be better to start from simple TOEFL questions (Longman, for example) and then proceed to much more arduous ones("Keys for TOEFL iBT", Barron an so on). All preparation material are very different; fortunately, the complexity of actual TOEFL is equal to the simple or medium ones. When you are able to solve 85% of Barron's reading you will get 27-30 points.
3) All the questions look the same. If you understood how to solve some of them it would be easy to do the same with others. Look for specific words and try to understand overall idea of the passage. At the same time it's possible to solve most problems based on common sense.
Good luck!

[SkiIucK]

Hello, Konstantin, contragulations for passing the TOEFL test. Could you please enlighten me about the maximum amount of points set for each part of the tesT?

[Konstantin]

Hello.
30+30+30+30 = 120
You could find all answers here: www.toefl.org

[Englishuser]

Hi sensipar,

Yes, I know what it feels like trying to work out the right answers to test questions under pressure. When time is extremely limited, that is, you probably will be reading each passage once only, I think it is advisable to have a flick through the questions before reading the text. Even better than that, you could read the first question carefully and then try to locate the correct answer to that question in the text, then deal with question two, and so on. Of course, this approach is not suitable unless the test questions progress in logical order.

All the best

EU