Can anyone help me to find out what resources are suitable for practicing the TOEFL exam reading section? I had the TOEFL exam a few days ago. I got 27 in writing, 25 in speaking, 26 in listening, and 17 in reading. Although I was able to read all the text, in the reading section, almost easily, the reading questions were very tough and the four-answer questions were similar to each other, and was pretty tough to take the right answer in 30 seconds for each question. I believe, it is because the source that I was practicing on, was not commensurate with the rate of difficulty of the real exam. Even ETS website free practicing questions cannot demonstrate the difficulty of the real exams. I live in Iran and cannot purchase authentic practicing materials easily, although I can do that with extra effort. I just want to know if anyone can help me or introduce any other resources that represent the real difficulty of the questions in the exams. The TPO simulator provided by institutions in Iran does not represent the real difficulty of the exams in the limited time span. Any other suggestion will be welcomed.
I have had to take TOEFL about two decades ago since it was an admission requirement. Back then, as now, I believe that the biggest problem was in having full and unequivocal understanding of the questions. The general approaches to academic reading fail miserably on the question/answer sets. In general academic reading, you can afford a slightly superficial understanding, at least on the first reading, only to later drill down to get all the details clearly and dispose of the inevitable misunderstandings of the first reading.
Yet, when it comes to any sort of standardized-style examinations, superficial understanding of questions is never enough, and it will jeopardize any benefits you may have from deep understanding of the prompt itself (the text or the topic you're asked about).
The fact that you classify the questions as similar should be inconsequential: they are very stereotypical, and must be devised along some common patterns. That the similarity seems to be an obstacle means that you have only superficial understanding of the questions - an understanding that is insufficient to answer correctly. Your perception of similarity of questions should be a flag to yourself that you've got some work to do in the area of not glossing over details in the questions. So, if you are looking for some definite area you could focus on, it'd be to understand the nuance of the language used in the questions and answer sets. That language is to a large extent stereotypical as well, and full of patterns that you'll only find in the reading q/a sets and not anywhere else. You would probably not be mistaken in looking at it as if it was a technical jargon. Familiarity with it would go a long way in improving your results.
Think of it this way: the techniques useful in reading the prompt are different than those in reading the questions/answers. You can't afford the long time it would take to fully &quot;dissect&quot; the prompt before you tackle the questions. So you won't, in most cases, be able to have unequivocal understanding of the prompt a priori answering the questions. You need to acknowledge that some finer points of the text may have to remain unclear until a question is there to point you to go back and delve deeper if needed. On the other hand, the questions cannot be glossed over. You have to fully understand them, and then the similarities will be of no concern - a bit of trivia, but otherwise of little consequence. With full understanding, the differences between the questions will stand out, the similarities will become a background feature.
Remember that the people who write the prompts and the questions and answers do it as a matter of their job, and it's done en-masse. There's no way to be too creative at such a job. The prompts (the reading texts), the questions and the answer sets are all extremely stereotypical - you just lack the experience of seeing enough of them to see those patterns. So you may have to take me at my word that the authors of the prompt text, the questions, and the answers, are not really trying to be clever to &quot;catch you&quot; unaware or to trick you. No, I don't have any direct nor 2nd nor even 3rd-hand experience here: it's all based on my morbid curiosity in the workings of the standardized test &quot;machinery&quot;. Very unfortunately, it is a &quot;pay to play&quot; field where the &quot;research material&quot; is firmly behind a paywall, and one is contractually forbidden from discussing some of the details. Thus, whatever I can divulge here is partly filtered by my sincere wish not to break the rules I willingly bound myself to.
I can only sympathize with the observation that lots of study materials are not representative of the difficulty of the test. That's because there are practical limitations to doing an adequate job when preparing such materials.
Let's now look at things from the perspective of a person who want to create test preparation materials (&quot;study books&quot; and such). There are only two  major avenues:

Repeatedly taking the test as often as allowed, having money to pay for it, and having the perfect memory to memorize everything and good enough writing skills to paraphrase the structure of the prompts, questions and answers. If all you want is TOEFL, and you're taking it in the US, then it's a $2k/month &quot;hobby&quot; if you want to take as many tests as you are allowed to. If you want to diversify, then GRE at maximum rate is $1k/year, SAT is $400/year (depending on how exactly how many administrations there are in a given year), etc.

Breaking the test contract if you are a test-taker (i.e. by using some obscured device to capture test content in violation of the rules you agreed to abide by), or breaking your employment contract if you happen to work for ETS, or breaking the law outright if you figure out how to get access to the test materials in spite of not working for ETS. In some jurisdictions/situations, breaking the rules of employment contract may in itself be a violation of the law as well.


Most people who want to make any sort of a career, even if brief, in test preparation world, will do well to avoid the 2nd option. The 1st option takes resources, dedication, and people with memory skills - and you need that up-front. The 2nd option carries, well, a false promise at best.
I've taken TOEFL some number of times over the years out of sheer morbid interest, and what I could reverse-engineer was:

The multiple-choice part of the test is selected from a permutation of a large pool of prompts and question/answer sets.
There may be a tendency to think it &quot;easy&quot; to leak those, maybe just slightly altered, to provide test preparations material. It's obvious that each person taking the tests within a certain time frame can be individually identified just from the multiple-choice material they leaked. As for the fallout - the contract one signs to take the test is telling. It's important. I imagine that in the best of cases, one would be &quot;only&quot; barred from taking any other ETS tests when caught - that's a problem in itself, since ETS also administers GRE, for example. Thankfully the academia is slowly weaning itself off of the unhealthy dependence on ETS as a gatekeeper. Worse consequences would all be of legal nature, I imagine. IANAL so that's all I know about it.

The essay part seems to be &quot;organizationally constrained&quot;. A decade+ ago, the essays were clearly scored by humans. And those humans must be on a team. And that team has some leadership in place, surely to answer questions of those in the trenches, or review some of their scoring, etc. It's no different than in any other group setting where multiple employees make repetitive decisions along some pattern, e.g. in awarding bank loans. Only the timeframes may differ. My entirely made-up guess would be that, say, a test scoring person may have to score a 100 essays a day, but a banker may approve/process a couple house loans a day, on average, so there can be a 1-2 orders of magnitude disparity in rates, but the oversight process, and the relatively rigid guide set for each essay prompt or each type of a loan would remain.
The essays are so specific and different from each other that I bet it's impossible to be scoring different essays all at the same time. Maybe approving a couple different personal residential bank loan types may be within the ability of a good banker. When I imagine myself scoring an essay, there'd be just way too much to remember to be able to effectively score multiple essay prompts in succession. So, I imagine that most of the time the people who score would be working at one prompt (topic) at a time, and switch as needed, but such &quot;switching&quot; requires everyone to switch: the managers have to switch and familiarize with the new essay prompt just as the people who score.
My experience so far is that if you get multiple people to take TOEFL on the same day, it's highly probable they'll be writing the &quot;same&quot; essay. In the last few years, it became rather clear to me that some of the essays can't but be scored by software, and not a particularly clever software at that. That software used to be really easily fooled by syntactically correct writing that had a varied and &quot;highly literate&quot; vocabulary yet amounted to gibberish - it wouldn't pass by any human not totally asleep at their job. Nowadays, the software seems to be cleverer, but still distinguishable. I guess if you think of a future as a test scorer, it'll be a future of historical interest mostly at some point.


Each time I took the test, many of my curious friends did as well, and we all had the same essay prompt but our multiple-choice questions all varied and the best we could tell there was no overlap between them. Surely ETS has a huge pool of questions to pull from.