All right, welcome back and here we are talking about iBT versus Essentials, the Reading section.
Now, I'm sure you just really want to know what does The essentials Test look like and how is
it different from the iBT and probably which one is easier too, so let's talk about that together
right now. Here's a quick outline of what we're going to do. We're going to do a walkthrough of
the TOEFL iBT Reading section, Essentials Reading section walkthrough as well, so we're going to go
through each of the tests and just see some of the differences and similarities between them.
I'm going to review the question types to show you which show up on the Essentials, examples
of new question types on the Essentials, there are a couple new ones, and of course, which tests should
you take at the end. And, by the way, I'm going to just say this before all of these videos about
iBT vs Essentials, if you're not sure if your school or institution takes the Essentials, you
have to ask them. I'm not, I don't know, I don't know, sorry. So, let's talk about it right now. The
iBT. The first thing to know about the iBT is that there's one part, three passages, 30 questions, and
the passages are three academic readings. So, it's pretty simple and straightforward, I mean it's a
difficult test, but the structure is pretty simple. You have a pretty long text, about 700 words and
then you have a question on the left, and you have to answer 10 different questions about the passage.
Here's an example of a vocabulary question, it looks something like this.
In the Essentials Test, it's a bit different. There are two parts instead of one.
There are five passages in total, but there are the same number of questions 30 questions.
Another difference is the type of reading. So, it's not all academic reading. In fact, it's mostly
general reading with one academic table and one article.
So, here's a one question type which is vocabulary, so vocabulary looks very different,
there's no passage, you just get a word and you have to match with a synonym.
That's it. Not a lot of strategy here, either you know what the word means or you don't,
and you have to find the best synonym. So, it's a little tough, but it's very simple.
Then you have to read a short general reading. A short general reading might be something
like this, which is about, this is a medical, what is this, medicine directions, thank you, sorry.
So, this is directions for taking some medicine. It might be a coupon or promotion, something like
that. Another general reading, which is a bit longer, this will be followed by four questions, this is a
blog post, or magazine article, or news article, but again, it's a general reading, not academic.
Then you'll get a table, and this table is academic. The table has two or three sections,
and they talk about some academic thing. In this case, it's lithops which are living stones, but
it could be about a certain bird species, it could be a lot of different things. So, in part two the
structure is very similar. You'll have these five vocabulary questions again, and then you'll have
just one daily life passage to read, and this will be an email, or blog post, or something like that.
And then there'll be one academic text, this will be the hardest reading that you have,
and it's about 200 words, I think, I'll have to double-check that, I wrote it down somewhere
here. Essentials Test, there are 30 questions, 10 vocabulary, 10 daily life, and 10 academic
English questions based on the passages. There are 10 different question types on iBT, nine on
Essentials, we'll talk about those in a minute. iBT is not adaptive, but the Essentials Test is
adaptive. Adaptive means that it will change based on your performance. So, if you don't do
so well in part 1 of the reading, part two of the reading will be a little bit easier.
If you do well in part one of the reading, part two will be a little bit more difficult. That's
adaptive. So, the big difference between the iBT and the Essentials, I mean there's a lot of differences,
but there are a lot less words, much less, something, fewer words to read on the Essentials Test. In the
Essentials Test you only have to read 600 words, on the iBT you have to read up to 2100 words. There's
a lot more you have to read in the iBT, each passage is 700 words, the passages are really long.
These passages are short and sweet in the Essentials. So, there are significantly fewer
words to read, let me, let me read this, in the TOEFL Essentials Test. The mix of general
and academic English also makes the vocabulary easier to understand. So, it's a lot less stressful,
the Essentials Test for the Reading section, a lot fewer, much fewer, a lot fewer words to read,
I got to check my grammar on that one. So, you have to read less, and then also the questions are a bit
easier because it's more general English. So, the easier test is definitely the Essentials test.
All right, so quick rundown of the essentials Reading. You have a vocabulary task in part one,
five questions look something like this. You have general reading and daily life. There are two
general reading questions, two general reading passages, each followed by two questions.
So, you'll have a short general reading like the directions on some medicine,
and there'll be two questions after this, and a longer general reading that's a blog post or an
email and then two questions about this, and then you'll have an academic reading which is tables,
and it'll look something like this. And there'll be four true or false questions after each one,
And then in part two, it's very similar. You have the vocabulary task, five words and you have
to choose the most similar, just one reading about daily life and then an academic reading passage. So,
for this one, you have the vocabulary and then you have just a blog post or email like this,
and then an academic reading that's a bit longer. So that's the structure of the Essentials Test. Now
and the Reading section, just talking about the Reading section, now let's talk about question
types. So, you don't have to worry about all the question types and what they're called,
but I'm going to run through this really quickly. A vocabulary, just like I showed you already,y they
do show up, they look different, but they do show up here. You sometimes will get a question like
this on the Essentials as well in a passage, but it's more common that you'll see these
vocabulary questions. Factual information which is basically like a detail question,
they show up, you know these are the most common question types, they're pretty simple. The iBT
they look like this but, in the Essentials Test you might get them about general reading, like this one,
or you could get them about the table, like this. Now, this is called true, false, or not stated, but
this is actually doing the same thing as factual information; it's just asking you
what what was said, is this true, is it not true, was it not stated, that's basically factual
information. So, it's pretty much the same thing, just a different structure. Inference
and rhetorical purpose. These questions are a little bit tricky, but they show up as well.
Inference questions are, you know, asking you like, "What can be inferred, what can be concluded?"
The rhetorical purpose is like, "Why does the author do this. Why is this like this?" For example here,
about a newspaper article, "What is implied about this person?" And then you have to
say what's implied or why does the author compare piano literacy to print literacy.
So the question is asking you for something that's not directly stated, you have to guess,
you have to infer. So, those are a little tricky, I'm not going to talk too much about them here, I have
other videos talking about inference questions, but they show up on the Essentials test as well.
There's also sentence simplification and negative factual information.
Sentence simplification asks you to make something simpler; they give you a long sentence and then you
have to make it a little bit easier. They also have negative factual information which asks you what
is not stated or mentioned, so they do have those as well. They have these insert text, where you have
to take a sentence and put it in the right black square, so they do have that question as well. But
there's something to note that's very important about these question types. So, right now you might
be thinking, "Oh man, there's all these question types, I don't know what these mean." It's actually
a lot easier on the Essentials, and let me explain why. Just give me one minute to go through the rest
of these. So, these question types, reference, prose summary, and fill-in-a- table do not show
up on the Essentials. There is a table, but it's very different on the Essentials test. So, as I
mentioned before, there are two new question types in the Essentials test, true, false, or not stated,
which is in those academic tables, and sometimes they'll ask you about the main idea. They never
did this in the reading section in the iBT, but now they're doing it in the Essentials Reading section.
Of course, there are these vocabulary questions, they look a little new,
but then these are the true, false, not stated from the academic tables.
So, in other words, three passage types only include factual information and vocabulary questions.
In other words, 18 of the 30 questions will be one of these two question types. So there's a lot more
simple question types in the Essentials Test than the iBT. So, there are these vocabulary questions here,
on these short general reading passages, these two questions are, from what I've
seen, always factual information questions. And then these true, false, or not stated questions
are also pretty much factual information questions. So, they're pretty simple and straightforward.
Most question types only show up once on the test, if at all. So, the question types you will
definitely see are vocabulary, factual information, inference, and rhetorical purpose. These are the
most common. The other ones, maybe they show up once in a while, sentence simplification,
negative factual information, insert text, once in a while those show up. And the other three,
they don't show up at all. And true, false, or not stated we talked about already.
And the main idea. So, there are only really like five question types you have to worry about.
This main idea and the vocabulary, factual information, inference, and rhetorical purpose.
The other question types do come up, sentence simplification, negative factual information, insert
text, sorry for all these TOEFL vocabulary stuff, but basically, don't worry about them, don't
worry about them too much, they only show up once in a while. Hopefully, that makes sense. Thank you
for sticking around to the end. Which test should you take? All right, so if you have a choice,
take the Essentials Test. The reading passages are shorter, the question types are simpler, and
the vocabulary is easier. Unless you want to give yourself a challenge, then take the iBT,
but in general, the Essentials test is easier. Thank you guys for watching, and please, you know, push,
smash, touch, lightly graze, just give it a kiss,
the subscribe, the subscribe button, the like button, the notifications bell. Thank you guys
for sticking around to the end. Good luck on your TOEFL studies and let me know what you guys think
in the comments below. Alright, I'll see you next week, and the next one where I talk about the
Writing section, next one, Essentials versus iBT. All right, take care guys.