4 Reasons to Prepare Your TOEIC Before Taking the Test!

The TOEIC test assesses much more than your level of English. Your mastery of the test format, your ability to concentrate and your sense of logic will also have a significant impact on your score.

What makes the TOEIC frightening is its format and its duration (What does the TOEIC test?). To take this test successfully, you must know how to stay focused for a long time and answer questions quickly, which means knowing how to manage your time and concentration.

To increase your efficiency, it is necessary to practice by taking several mock exams, and to spend time analyzing the questions and your recurring errors. Below, we present 4 useful reasons to prepare the TOEIC before taking it.

1. Become familiar with the test format and the instructions for each part.

From one TOEIC session to another, the format remains the same and the instructions for the 7 parts of the TOEIC also remain the same. You need to know them, that way you won't have to go through them again, and thus save time and energy.

2. Get familiar with the rhythm of the audio tape.

The TOEIC has a listening section. It lasts 45 minutes without interruption. You need to get used to the pace of the narrators and the flow of questions. You cannot replay the question or pause the audio tape. This constraint is amplified in parts 1 and 2 because the questions as well as the proposed answers are not written on the booklet. In order not to feel the frustration of being overwhelmed by the rhythm of the test, we recommend that you train with our mock exams.

3. Familiarize yourself with the TOEIC vocabulary.

The TOEIC is a test that always uses the same type of vocabulary with the same level of difficulty throughout the test (B2-C1). Our 200% TOEIC manual and our online preparation include all the vocabulary words that often appear in the test. The practice exercises will help you get used to these terms and help you remember them. This vocabulary will also help you feel more comfortable in the corporate world afterwards. Remember, the TOEIC tests your ability to understand English in a business setting.

4. Train with TOEIC-type questions

The TOEIC tests a limited number of concepts. Certain types of questions come up very often. Spotting these questions and developing strategies to answer them easily will allow you to answer more quickly and correctly. The implementation of these automatisms is facilitated by studying with TOEIC questions classified by categories.

Example (taken from our book 200% TOEIC ):

In many questions in parts 5 and 6, you must choose between several words with the same root but of different grammatical natures. In most of these questions, you will therefore have the choice between:

a verb - ex: influencing / to influence
a name - ex: the influence
an adjective - ex: influential
an adverb - ex: influentially

Example of a grammatical question:

Given the bad weather in the Mediterranean region last month, the delay in shipping the spare parts to Portugal was certainly...

A) understand
B) understandable
C) understandably
D) understanding

The correct answer is (B) because the missing word must be an adjective.

By determining the grammatical nature of the missing word (noun, verb, adjective, etc.), we can often answer the question correctly without having understood the meaning of the sentence!