Tips for Reading Part 5

Hi and welcome back to another set of strategies for the TOEIC test. This time I will discuss helpful strategies for Part 5 & 6. In part 5, you will be asked to choose the appropriate answers to 40 statements. There are 4 choices to consider, some of which are about grammar while others ask about word choice and word form.  

The grammar points you will find in the test include:

·      Conjunctions

·      Prepositions

·      Verb tenses

·      Subject-verb agreement

·      Pronouns

·      Conditional sentences

·      Active and Passive voice

·      Adverbs of frequency

·      Adjectives and adverbs

·      Causative verbs

·      Subjunctive

Regarding word choice and word form, you might be tested on how much knowledge of parts of speech or word meaning you have. For example:

1.    We expect to see further _______________ over the next year.

A) improve

B) improved

C) improvement

D) improving

2.    The language _____________ now offers courses in both English and Chinese.

A) compound

B) institute

C) branch

D) substitution

Statement 1 is testing you knowledge of parts of speech. You can notice this from the choices which are all derived from the same word root. Therefore, the word meaning is not what is tested here. Which part of speech of “improve” fits the sentence is what you need to decide here.

The part of speech is a lexical category of grammatical words for which you need to be able to identify the structure of the sentence and relationship between words. In question 1, the missing word is preceded by “further”, which is an adjective, and followed by “over”, which is a preposition. Normally, an adjective precedes a noun, and a noun can be followed by a preposition. Therefore, it is highly likely that the missing word is a noun. The next step is to look for a noun form the choices given. You may notice the suffix “-ment”, which makes a noun (a suffix is the ending part of a word). Therefore, C) improvement is the correct answer to statement 1.

Statement 2 is testing your knowledge of word meaning as you can see that all choices given are nouns of different meaning, so the part of speech is what you need to identify. You have to read and understand the sentence and decide which word fits into the context in terms of meaning. Also, you need to know the meaning of the word choices to be able to choose the right one. Statement 2 is talking about a place where different language courses are provided, so B) institute matches the context.

In short, when doing the questions asking about the part of speech,

1.    Start with the words preceding and following the missing words and identify the possible structure.

2.    Do not need to read the whole sentence. (Do not forget that you have very limited time to complete all of the questions in the test).

3.    However, doing the questions asking bout word meaning requires you to read the whole statement and think of the context and choose the most suitable word to fill in the sentence.