TOEFL iBT Speaking Section Practice Online – FULL Test 1

This is an original TOEFLIBTee speaking practice set written in the style of the pre-2019 six-task Speaking section (see the note above). The current test doesn't use these tasks, so here is how to get value from the set today:

• Tasks 1 and 2: answer each one out loud in about 45 seconds. Describing your own experiences and giving a reasoned opinion is good practice for the kind of personal and opinion questions you may hear in the Take an Interview task.
• Tasks 3 to 6: have someone read the listening script to you (or read it aloud once yourself), take short notes, and then summarize it out loud. This trains the note-taking and academic listening you need for the Listening section.
• Listen and Repeat practice: choose five sentences from the scripts, have someone say them or record them, and repeat each one word for word. Accuracy matters more than speed.

Task 1

Describe a hobby or skill you taught yourself without taking a class. Explain how you learned it and why you kept doing it.

Task 2

Some people prefer to spend their free time outdoors. Other people prefer to spend their free time indoors. Which do you prefer? Explain why.

Task 3

A Community Garden on Campus?

Several other universities have turned unused sections of land into student-run gardens where anyone can grow vegetables or flowers. I believe our campus should start a similar project on the empty lot behind the recreation center. A garden would give students a hands-on way to learn about plants and where food comes from, and it would give people a quiet outdoor space to relax between classes. To get the project started, the student government could ask for volunteers to prepare the soil and set up a simple watering system during the first semester. Once established, the garden could be maintained by a small student club, so it wouldn't need a full-time staff member.

Sincerely, Marcus Webb

Listening script

W: Did you read that letter in the student paper about turning the lot behind the rec center into a garden?

M: I did, actually. I think it's a nice idea, but I'm not sure it'll work the way he's describing it.

W: What do you mean?

M: Well, he says a student club could take care of it after the first semester. But clubs lose members every year. What happens to the garden the summer after everyone who started it graduates?

W: I guess someone would have to keep recruiting new members.

M: Right, and gardens need attention basically every day, not just once a week at a club meeting. Someone has to water things, pull weeds, deal with pests. That's a lot to ask of students who are already busy with classes.

W: So you think it would just get abandoned after a year or two?

M: That's my worry. It's a nice idea on paper, but without someone responsible for it long-term, I think it'll end up as an overgrown lot again pretty quickly.

Question: The man expresses doubts about the proposal in the letter. Summarize the plan he describes, then explain the reasons behind his concerns.

Task 4

Habituation

Living things constantly receive signals from their surroundings, and reacting to every single one would use an enormous amount of energy. To avoid this, many animals rely on a process called habituation, in which repeated exposure to a harmless stimulus gradually reduces the strength of the response to it. Unlike forgetting, habituation is a temporary and reversible adjustment: if the stimulus stops appearing for a while and then returns, the original response often comes back at close to full strength. Habituation lets an animal ignore signals that have already proven to be unimportant, freeing its attention for changes in the environment that might actually matter, such as the approach of a predator or the appearance of new food.

Listening script

Let me give you an example that makes habituation easy to picture. Imagine a family that moves into a house near a train track. For the first few nights, the sound of the passing trains wakes everyone up. It's loud, it's unfamiliar, and their brains treat it as something worth paying attention to. But after a couple of weeks, something interesting happens: most of the family sleeps right through it. The sound hasn't gotten any quieter — their nervous systems have simply learned that this particular noise, night after night, never leads to anything that matters. So the response fades.

Now here's the part people don't expect. If that same family goes on vacation for a month and comes back, the first night home, the train noise wakes them up again, almost as badly as it did when they first moved in. The habituation faded because the repeated exposure stopped. It's not that they forgot the sound was harmless — it's that the adjustment needs to be refreshed by continued exposure, or it wears off.

Question: Explain, using the family's experience with the train noise, why habituation can fade after a break in exposure.

Task 5

Listening script

M: Hey, you look stressed. Everything OK?

W: Not really. My laptop completely died this morning — the screen just went black and won't turn back on. And I have a paper due Friday that's not backed up anywhere except on that laptop.

M: Oh no. Did you take it to the repair shop on campus?

W: I did. They said it might be fixable, but it could take until next week, and even then they're not sure the files on the hard drive are safe.

M: That's rough. Well, there are computers in the library you could use in the meantime.

W: Right, but that doesn't get my file back. All my notes and the draft I'd already written are gone unless that hard drive works.

M: Have you tried asking your professor for an extension? If you explain what happened, most professors would probably understand.

W: Maybe. I just hate asking for extensions — it feels unprofessional. But I guess starting completely over by Friday isn't realistic either.

Question: Describe the problem facing the woman, then explain which of the two options mentioned you think she should choose and why.

Task 6

Listening script

Plants can't run away from the animals that eat them, so you might assume they're defenseless. They're not. Let's look at two main strategies plants use to protect themselves.

The first is physical defense: structures that make a plant hard or unpleasant to eat. Thorns and spines are the obvious examples. A goat will usually skip a thorny shrub if there's something easier to eat nearby. But physical defenses can be much smaller, too. Many plants have leaves covered in tiny stiff hairs that make it hard for insects to walk across the surface or chew through it, and others have tough, waxy leaves that simply take too much effort to eat.

The second strategy is chemical defense. Many plants produce compounds that taste bitter or make an animal sick, so an animal that takes one bite learns to leave that plant alone. What's interesting is that some plants don't keep these chemicals at high levels all the time, because making them costs energy. Instead, when an insect starts chewing on a leaf, the plant increases the amount of these chemicals, sometimes even in leaves that haven't been touched yet. The defense switches on mainly when it's needed.

Question: Using points and examples from the talk, explain two ways plants defend themselves against the animals that eat them.