Aim for English
Understanding the main ideas in TOEFL
TOEFL iBT at a glance
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- Understanding main ideas
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TOEFL iBT tip of the month
TOEFL assesses your ability to communicate in an academic environment. There are similarities in reading, listening, speaking and writing questions. While your English has to be very good, the test won’t be impossible if you learn a few skills and do as much practice as possible.
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Understanding main ideas in TOEFL
What's important?
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Topic sentences
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Thesis statements
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Conclusions
Understanding main ideas
What you learn in reading will help you in the other sections of the test. You’ll be presented with articles in an academic format, and you can use this structure to understand main ideas quickly without reading everything. Also you should speak and write in a structured way too. Now, you do need to be a bit flexible in seeing where main ideas are, but through seeing different examples, it’ll help you become familiar a variety of structures.
Most articles you read in the test have a thesis statement at the end of the introduction. This is the main idea for the whole passage. Each following paragraph has a topic sentence, which is the main idea for that paragraph only. Some articles also have a concluding paragraph, and this can be a paraphrase of the thesis statement.