TOEFL Read an Academic Passage
One of the 3 task types in the Reading section. 103 practice questions in the bank, across 19 sets.
Read an Academic Passage gives you a short academic text — roughly 200 to 280 words — with about six questions on it. The 700-word passages of the retired format are gone; what replaced them is dense rather than long, so almost every sentence is testable.
What it looks like
A real item from the practice bank:
Of the roughly seven thousand languages spoken in the world today, linguists estimate that nearly half may disappear before the end of this century. A language is generally considered endangered when children stop learning it, for once a generation grows up speaking only a more dominant tongue, the older language is unlikely to survive the death of its last elderly speakers. In many communities this shift is already far advanced. The forces behind it are not hard to identify
The word "embodies" in the third paragraph is closest in meaning to
- Ahides away
- Bcontains and expressescorrect
- Cdestroys
- Dtranslates
*Explanations in the PrepScore bank are written for a Chinese-speaking audience, so the reasoning on this page is ours rather than a translation of the bank’s.*
How to approach it
- Read the whole passage before the questions. At this length, skimming costs more than it saves.
- Track the claim and the evidence for it — most questions are about one or the other.
- For a purpose question, ask what the sentence is doing, not what it says.
How much practice there is
The bank holds 103 questions of this type across 19 sets. 52% sit in the basic layer and the rest in the advanced layer, which unlocks once your basic-layer accuracy passes 60% — the same two-stage shape the real test uses in Reading and Listening.
Practise Read an Academic Passage free
Ten questions a day at no cost, with the reasoning on every answer.
Frequently asked questions
How long are TOEFL academic passages?
Roughly 200 to 280 words, with about six questions. ETS has not published a fixed word count.
Should I skim TOEFL reading passages?
No. They are short enough to read properly, and skimming a dense text throws away the advantage the shorter format gives you.
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