Toefl exam Essentials

b. obnoxious.
c. obvious.
d. confident.
5. Although teaching is not a particularly lucrative career, I
wouldn’t do anything else. Knowing I’m helping others to
learn is far more important to me than money.
Lucrative means
a. highly profitable.
b. highly rewarding.
c. highly exciting.
d. highly repetitive.
MAKING INFERENCES
Inference questions on the TOEFL exam ask you to draw logi-
cal conclusions about what you read. Sometimes a writer does not
explicitly state his or her main idea or offer a conclusion. You must
infer the writer’s meaning. To do this you must carefully read the
details and facts of a passage and look for context clues that reveal
a writer’s attitude.

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READING
97
Word choice—the specific words a writer chooses to describe
people, places, and things—is one of the best clues to how a
writer feels about her subject. Word choice, also called diction,
includes these forms:
■
the particular words a writer uses
■
the way words are arranged in a sentence
■
repetition of words or phrases
■
inclusion of particular details
For example, consider how word choice affects the two sen-
tences below: