Let’s go through a TOEIC Part 7 sample question today.
First of all, let’s look at a sample question:
Here we have a small section of text and two questions related to it.
How should we begin?
A common misconception people have is that we should begin by reading though the text, then read the questions, then solve the questions.
In fact, that way is inefficient, and may not give us enough time to read through the question and solve it in the limited time we have.
This is how we should begin:
1. Look at the description of the text.
2. Look briefly at the first question, and think about the key words.
3. Do the same for the second question.
We should now go on to skim read the article.
I skim read the article and picked up some words.
The fastest way to skim read the article is simply to pick out some of the simple words.
The words I picked out were seats, headphones, magazines, books, travel time, beverage and snack, four star meal, dessert, fly, round trip tickets, and trip (x2).
After that, I had another look at question 153.
Q. What is being advertised?
(A) A hotel chain
- We don’t often use words like seat/fly/trip to describe something we find in a hotel, so we can quickly get rid of that one
(B) A new restaurant
- There are lots of words related to food here, but restaurants rarely talk about travel or tickets, which eliminates this one.
(C) An airline
- This is the correct answer.
(D) A shuttle service
- A shuttle service wouldn’t talk about food or restaurants, or books or magazines, eliminating it.
We can confidently say that the answer is (C).
Next, question 154.
Look at the question:
Q. What can the customer do after his fourth trip?
The most important words here are customer, fourth, trip.
We should scan the text to find one of these words. “Customer” and “trip” are common, but “fourth” is quite specific so let’s look for something related to that.
We can see the sentence with the word “four” in it, a big hint.
(A) Use the service in another country
- “Another country” is not written in the sentence.
(B) Pay nothing for travel within the country.
- As you can see in the image above,
Pay nothing = free
Travel = trip
Within the country = domestic
(C) Visit any of the 600 cities.
- 600 cities is not written in the sentence.
(D) Receive free accommodation
- Accommodation refers to rooms or places to sleep, and this is not discussed in the sentence.
What do you think, everyone?
Could you use this pattern to solve TOEIC questions?