Practice TOEIC Questions › Reading - Incomplete Sentences
This part gives you thirty sentences, each with one blank, and four answer choices per question. You pick the word or phrase that correctly and logically completes the sentence.
This is where the Reading section begins. There's no audio and no time pressure on individual questions. You just have the overall 75-minute clock that's shared across Parts 5, 6, and 7, so you control the pace.
Word form. All four choices share the same root word but come in different forms: noun, verb, adjective, adverb. You need to figure out which part of speech the sentence is asking for.
Verb tense and form. The choices differ by tense or form, like "manage," "manages," "managed," and "managing." There will be context clues in the sentence that tell you which one fits.
Prepositions. You'll see four different prepositions like in, on, at, and by. Some of these are logical, but many of them are fixed expressions that you either know or you don't.
Vocabulary. All four choices are grammatically correct in the blank, but only one of them actually makes sense given what the sentence means. These require you to understand the full sentence, not just the grammar.
Conjunctions and connectors. Words like although, because, however, and despite. These questions test whether you understand the logical relationship between the two parts of the sentence.
Pronouns. The choices test different pronoun forms: subject, object, possessive, or reflexive. The sentence structure tells you which form belongs in the blank.
Same root, wrong form. This is the most frequent trap you'll encounter. Take a sentence like "The manager made a ___ decision." You need an adjective here, not an adverb or a noun. All four choices look similar, but only one makes sense grammatically.
Grammatically fine, contextually wrong. Sometimes more than one choice is grammatically valid in the blank, but only one of them makes logical sense when you read the whole sentence. You have to look at the full picture, not just the words immediately around the blank.
Look-alike words. Words like "affect" vs. "effect" or "economic" vs. "economical" look almost identical but mean different things. They show up as wrong answers on a regular basis.
Fixed preposition pairings. Phrases like "responsible for," "interested in," and "depend on" don't always follow a logical pattern. You can't figure them out from context alone. They just need to be memorized.