TOEFL Writing Practice Test: Question & Answers
In the first task, you read a passage, listen to a lecture, and answer the question based on what you have read and heard.
Remember for 1st question:
- Response time: 20 mins
- Word limit: 150-225 words
- Paragraph reading time: 3 mins
For this task, you will read a passage on an academic topic. You can take notes while you read the passage. Once the passage is removed, you will listen to a lecture on the same topic. You will be able to see the passage again when it is time for you to write. Here, you can use your notes to write the answer.
Reading Passage
Question: Summarise the points made in the lecture, explaining how they respond to the specific points made in the reading passage.
Toward the end of his life, the Chevalier de Seingalt (1725-1798) wrote a long memoir recounting his life and adventures. The Chevalier was a somewhat controversial figure, but since he met many famous people, including kings and writers, his memoir has become a valuable historical source about European society in the eighteenth century. However, some critics have raised doubts about the accuracy of the memoir. They claim that the Chevalier distorted or invented many events in the memoir to make his life seem more exciting and glamorous than it really was. For example, in his memoir, the Chevalier claims that while living in Switzerland, he was very wealthy, and it is known that he spent a great deal of money there on parties and gambling. However, evidence has recently surfaced that the Chevalier borrowed considerable sums of money from a Swiss merchant. Critics thus argue that if the Chevalier had really been very rich, he would not have needed to borrow money.
Critics are also sceptical about the accuracy of the conversations that Chevalier records in the memoir between himself and the famous writer Voltaire. No one doubts that the Chevalier and Voltaire met and conversed. However, critics complain that the memoir cannot possibly capture these conversations accurately because it was written many years after the conversations occurred. Critics point out that it is impossible to remember exact phrases from extended conversations held many years earlier. Critics have also questioned the memoir's account of the Chevalier's escape from a notorious prison in Venice, Italy. He claims to have escaped the Venetian prison by using a piece of metal to make a hole in the ceiling and climbing through the roof. Critics claim that while such a daring escape makes for enjoyable reading, it is more likely that the Chevalier's jailers were bribed to free him. They point out that the Chevalier had a number of politically well-connected friends in Venice who could have offered a bribe.
Sample Answer:
Giving some logical reasons, the professor is defending the Chevalier memoir and making it reliable. She uses sophistication to make the critics convinced that their claim on memoir is not true. First of all, she mentions the issue of borrowing some money from a merchant by Chevalier. She thinks the Chevalier was in trouble with cash and he hadn't enough time to prepare it . He hadn't time to sell his own properties and estates to provide the money. so the loan is reasonable, and it doesn't show his poverty. Secondly, the critics say that he escaped from jail by bribing the watchman. But we know that there were more powerful men there in the jail with much more powerful friends and relations that made the escape so easy for them, but they weren't able to escape. Therefore, we can accept what the Chevalier has said about the way he managed to escape from the prison using a piece of metal and digging the ceiling. The last reason the critics give on the unreliability of Chevalier's memoir is that the details of the conversation between Chevalier and Voltaire are not truly mentioned in details in Chelavier's memoir. They believe that there's a long period of time between the time they were conversing and the time Chelavier wrote that on paper. And it is impossible to write the exact talk that occurred at that time. However, the professor solved the dilemma easily. From his point of view, the Chevalier had a chance to get the tool due to the watchmen's come and go to repair the ceiling. Overall, the professor is trying to make his opinion seem true.
Agree/Disagree
Question: Do you agree or disagree with the following statement?
It is more important for students to understand ideas and concepts than it is for them to learn facts. Use specific reasons and examples to support your answer.
Sample Answer:
Basically, I agree with the idea that it is more important for students to understand ideas and concepts than it is for them to learn facts. There are two reasons to make my view convincing. That is because only learning facts makes it easy to get the main point in the wrong ways, and student is easy to lose their concentration on studying. Some people just want to get facts to reduce their learning time. However, it is a really dangerous idea and could be temporary and impermanent knowledge. For instance, when people learn english, they just memorise vocabulary and grammar. This makes people unable to communicate with foreigners even though they have studied english for more than 10 years. That is because they might learn focused on the facts, such as a score on an English test, not trying to study what these words came from, such as prefixes and stems of english. If someone who just learns in wrong way is a teacher, he will definitely use his students in the same method. In turn, it could be a serious problem, especially if it were an educational case.
Furthermore, students who concentrate on only the facts are easy to lose their interest of studying. If they could learn something, how it came from, or how it works, that encourage students to study harder and allow them to develop more creative hypotheses. For instance, when I had a history class in college, there were two kinds of distinctive teachers. One helped me to teach how to get a good grade in terms of the history class teaching only the facts. The other taught me both the answer, such as the name of the war and all processing of the history, such as why a specific war has to be, or what was the problem between two countries. I still remember parts of the history the second teacher taught, although it is not really related to my current major. When students learn something with the concepts and main idea, it will go longer than getting the information about only the facts.
As stated above, I agree with the idea that students should learn both concepts and facts together. That is because it is possible for students to study in a wrong way, which might be dangerous, and getting only facts will lead students to lack interest in studying. It is impossible to overstate the importance of both the process and the result in gaining some knowledge.
