Three more practice items to drill the pattern-recognition skill this task actually tests. For the full task breakdown and strategy, see the main Complete the Words guide.
Take the free TOEFL Benchmark Test and get your estimated band score in about 45 minutes.
Passage fragment: "The university offers several schol_____ for international students who demonstrate financial need."
Answer: scholarships. The surrounding context — "for international students who demonstrate financial need" — points directly to a specific academic vocabulary word rather than a generic one; the word-family pattern (schol-) narrows it further before you even reach the meaning.
Passage fragment: "Researchers were unable to rep_____ the results of the original study under laboratory conditions."
Answer: replicate. This is a common academic-context word family (rep-) where test-takers sometimes default to a more common but incorrect option like "repeat" — in scientific writing specifically, "replicate" is the precise term for reproducing a study's results, and context here signals formal academic register.
Passage fragment: "The committee's decision was based on a thorough eval_____ of all submitted proposals."
Answer: evaluation. A straightforward word-family completion, but worth noting as a reminder that the task rewards recognizing common academic noun endings (-ation, -ment, -ity) quickly rather than puzzling out each word from scratch.
Take the free TOEFL Benchmark Test and get your estimated band score in about 45 minutes.
All three items reward recognizing a word family from a partial spelling plus using surrounding context to confirm which specific word fits — not deep vocabulary knowledge of rare words. If you're consistently missing items like these, the fix is usually broader exposure to common academic word families (see our Academic Word List guide) rather than memorizing more individual words.
Practice all three Reading task types under real adaptive conditions.