TOEFL Reading Task 1 – Complete the Words

What is Complete the Words?

Welcome to the first task of the Reading section. In this type of question, you have to insert the missing letters in a short paragraph. What is Complete the Words? It is the first task of the TOEFL Reading section. You will see a short passage, usually up to 70-90 words, which contains 10 blanks.

Of course, the passage consists of a couple of sentences, but in each task of this type, you will see 10 blanks, and you have to complete them with the missing endings. In this task, you will have to focus on vocabulary, grammar and spelling. Now we are going to go through the strategies you have to apply in this task in order to get the full score.

Timing and scoring

But before we proceed to the strategies, let's look at timing and scoring. As I said, each task of this type has 10 blanks. In the whole test, you will see from 2 to 5 tasks of this type, depending on the random structure of the ETS test. You had better spend 2 to 3 minutes per task and no more. We are actually going to go through an example in this lecture, and you will see approximately how much time you will spend filling the gaps.

Each correct answer gives you one point, and an incorrect answer gives you zero points. If you are unsure, you had better insert a guess: it is better to have some answer than to leave the field blank. Now let's go to the important strategies that I recommend you use in order to get the full score.

Strategy 1: Use context clues

Strategy number 1: use context clues. It is probably the most important advice for this task. You have to read the whole sentence, or at least a meaningful part of the passage, or the whole passage. My recommendation is to start reading the passage and stop when you see that the next sentence is about something different. So you can read one or two sentences and then stop, because you will already have the context of what it is about. Then you can proceed with filling the gaps.

This is the crucial point: you have to have the context. You have to understand what this passage, this text, is about. Here I want to make a small experiment. Let's look at this example without context and try to fill these gaps: "This ___ are ___ for ___ strong bonds." It is very hard, right? If you see this sentence for the first time, I would say it is almost impossible to fill these gaps. And that is how you are going to feel on the actual test if you don't use the proper strategies.

If you have the whole context, one, if not many, of these gaps will be repeated in the previous or next sentences. Authors will use the same vocabulary as in the missing gaps. So you don't have to create your own words here, and you don't have to guess which one to include, because they will already be in the text. That's why it is very, very important to read the whole passage before you proceed to filling in the gaps.

Strategy 2: Check the words before and after the gap

Strategy number 2: check which words stand before and after the words with missing letters. If you see a noun, like "functions" in this case, which word can come before it? If you have enough English input, whether it is texts, listening or daily conversations, you will understand that here we should come up with an adjective. It is an adjective. Again, it is very important to have enough practice, because some of the missing gaps will be in combinations that are used very often, like "such as."

So you have to be aware of suffixes: which suffixes are usually used in adjectives, which in nouns and which in verbs. Those are the things you have to pay attention to. But the key idea of this strategy is to focus on which part of speech comes before or after the missing word. Then you will understand which one you need, as in the example here.

Strategies 3 and 4: Count the missing letters and keep moving

Strategy number 3 is actually a huge hint from ETS itself to test takers, because in the questions themselves you will see the number of missing letters: the number of underscores in each gap. This gives you a huge hint, because if you come up with a few ideas and don't know which word to use, you can just look at the number of letters and get rid of the words that don't match the number of missing letters. You will see this soon in the example we take: you may think the word is "records," but it is not "records," because that would be too many missing letters. So this is a very important piece of information that the exam gives you, and you had better use this strategy as well.

And the last strategy: if you're stuck, just move on. If you have enough time, you had better read the passage again and address this gap one more time. If you still cannot fill in this gap, just go to the next question, because time is precious. This question with 10 gaps should take no more than 3 minutes on the actual test. So pay attention to time; time is very important. We will talk about time more in these lectures, but if you're stuck, you had better not waste your time on one single gap. It's only one point.

Worked example: reading for context and part of speech

OK, it's time for an actual sample. I will give you 30 seconds to read this passage with gaps and think about which words you want to put in them. OK, let's start with the first one. I'm not going to read the first sentence, which has no gaps; let's start with the second one: "We ___ think ___ prehistoric ___ concentrated ___ on ___ survival."

Sometimes it can be a good idea to start from the end, because sentences quite often end in a noun. In this case, you can see that "survival" is a noun, and it follows a gap, which you might think of as "basic," because what kind of survival might you think of in prehistoric times? It might be basic survival. Once you start with this sentence, you can actually go both ways, so we might go from the beginning as well.

So we think about which word can be inserted here. Sorry, this is "might think." "We might think" is a very common expression, and for these particular gaps, I would say that what will help you is listening to and reading actual English input. Sometimes you are not going to guess the word without having seen many such examples in your daily life, in conversations and texts. So "we might think that" is correct.

We might think that prehistoric... who is prehistoric in this paragraph? It is about humans: you can see "early humans." So it is about people, right? "Concentrated on..." We already guessed that this one is the adjective "basic." So the remaining word shows the way these prehistoric people concentrated on basic survival: how, or in which way, they concentrated. They concentrated only on basic survival.

It is a good strategy to break the whole passage into logical parts from the beginning. In this case, we see that the next part starts with an introductory word, which could be something like "moreover." However, I guess you can already clearly see that it is "however" here. So you should break this paragraph into two distinct parts: in this case, the first two sentences are the first part, and the rest is the next part.

Worked example: letter counts and the key idea

So, starting from "however," let's continue: "However, it ___ clear ___ the ___ that ___ was important to them. They recorded more drawings of dancers than of any other group activity." That's enough to decide which words we are going to put in the gaps; we don't need to read further. "However, it..." again, this is more about the phrases I already showed you. "It is clear" is a stable unit that is used in daily spoken English and in texts. So, "However, it is clear." That is why we say "it is clear."

What we do next is look at the number of letters we need to insert in gap 8. It is 2 letters, so the word is going to be "from": "it is clear from the record." And why do I say "record" so easily? Because the first thing that actually came to mind while I was solving this myself was the word "records." We usually use multiple archives and multiple documents to review prehistoric things and come up with the facts. But in this case, we see only 3 missing letters in this word, so we cannot insert "records," because "records" would need 4, and we have to use "record." That's how you can tell which one is wrong and which one is correct: "records" has more letters than there should be here.

The last one is probably the biggest question: what can go here? To answer this last one, you have to go through the passage again and see what the keyword is: the key action that prehistoric humans performed. You can see that for over 10,000 years, early humans performed dances as a group activity. We might think that prehistoric people concentrated only on basic survival. However, it is clear from the record that ___ was important to them. So this whole piece of the passage is talking about dance, because dance was important to them, not only basic survival.

So we have to put in "dance," but in what form? "Dancing" can be considered a noun as well. So which one? In this case, we again look at the number of gaps. It is 4 gaps, right? So "dance"? No, "dance" doesn't work: it only adds 2 letters. "Dancer"? No. "Dancing"? This can be correct. Yes, that's right.

Summary: key tips for Complete the Words

So, to use this method, as we mentioned before: first of all, read through the whole passage, or a meaningful part of it, at once, and then try to address all the gaps together. Secondly, focus on the number of underscores in each gap. This will give you a clue about which word to insert, because quite often you will have multiple options. The key idea is also very important. Sometimes you need to read this part, or maybe the whole passage, to understand what the passage is about. They always ask you about the keywords; keywords are always missing. So you have to understand the key idea, and then you will find an answer that fits the gap.

As we mentioned before: read the paragraph first, and use grammar and logic to predict the missing parts. I would say logic here is more about your practical knowledge from English input, whether it is texts, listening or daily conversations. This is very important. Match word endings to the context and the number of letters; yes, we just discussed this. Make a smart guess if you're unsure; don't leave blanks empty, because you may guess right.

This is probably the last tip. Of course, if you're unsure and you have a few options that match the number of gaps, it's better to pick the best one and just leave it. You are not going to lose a point if you come up with the wrong idea, but you will definitely lose the point if you leave this space blank. OK, that was good practice. Let's go ahead to the next question in the Reading section.