Table of Contents - TOEFL Reading Section Tips: How to Read Faster By Breaking Down Long Sentences
Extracting important details from long sentences
To simplify long sentences and extract essential information, follow these three tips. These strategies help you quickly identify key points, maximizing your efficiency.
Tip 1 - recognize key details
The first step in breaking down a lengthy and complex sentence is to identify the key details. These details often include numbers and capitalized words such as dates, times, names, and locations. For instance, if a sentence mentions "In 2021, Dr. John Smith discovered a new species in the Amazon rainforest," the important details are "2021", "John Smith," and "Amazon rainforest". Recognizing these elements helps you understand the main points and context of the passage. Even if specific details are not directly questioned, they provide a framework that aids in comprehending the overall passage. Mastering the identification of who, what, and where in a sentence is a crucial starting point.
Tip 2 - determine what's important and what's not
Another important strategy is to distinguish between the essential and non-essential information within the sentence and passage. Often, passages include a mix of critical details needed to answer questions and additional information that is not necessary. You have two options here and you should try both while preparing to see what works best for you:
1) skim the paragraph, read the question and, if necessary, dive deeper into the paragraph to answer it
2) read the question first to identify what's important, and then look for this information in the paragraph - by pulling out the key details from these questions, you can then focus on finding and retaining the information needed to answer them, while disregarding the rest. For example, if a question asks about the significance of Dr. John Smith's discovery, you can concentrate on details related to his discovery rather than extraneous information.
Tip 3 - deal with academic wordiness
Finally, academic and educational passages in TOEFL reading section often contain verbose language that can obscure the main points. These passages tend to use many words to convey simple ideas. By focusing on the key details, you've already identified, and differentiating between important and unimportant information, you can improve your understanding. Ignore the long, academic phrasings and concentrate on extracting what's most necessary. For example, if a sentence says, "The extensive and rigorous study conducted over a period of several years ultimately led to the groundbreaking discovery", you can simplify it to "The study led to the discovery".
Turning long sentences into simple ones
As you can see, simplifying long sentences makes them a lot easier to understand. By breaking them down into shorter, more manageable parts, you make them less complex. Here are two methods to achieve this.
Method 1 - find the verb
When faced with a lengthy sentence, start by identifying the verb. Once you locate the verb, you can easily determine the subject preceding it and the object following it. This reveals the main idea of the sentence, providing a framework to understand the additional details. For example, in the sentence "The committee, after much deliberation, decided to approve the new policy," the verb is "decided". Knowing this, you can see that the committee is the subject, and the object is the approval of the new policy. With the main idea in place, the other information becomes easier to process.
Method 2 - find the adjective clauses
Adjective clauses often make sentences longer and more complex than they should be. These clauses function like adjectives, modifying the noun or pronoun they follow. By removing the adjective clause, you can still grasp the core message of the sentence. Adjective clauses typically begin with relative adverbs (where, when, why, how, whether) or relative pronouns (that, who, whom, whose, which).
For instance, consider the sentence:
"The scientist, who had spent years researching the topic, finally published her groundbreaking findings."
If you remove the adjective clause "who had spent years researching the topic," the sentence simplifies to "The scientist finally published her findings." This makes it much clearer and more straightforward.
Grammar
On top of potential issues mentioned above, there are a few grammar points you might encounter that are unfamiliar to some test takers, and could lead to misunderstanding, frustration or confusion. Here are two common grammar points often used in academic passages to be aware of:
Tip 1 - omitting relative pronouns
In academic writing, relative pronouns such as "who," "which," or "that" are often omitted if they are not the subject of the sentence. Here's an example with the omitted pronoun underlined:
The book, (which was) written by an acclaimed author, has received numerous awards.
The phrase "which was" could have been placed before "written" here, and the meaning would remain the same. However, pretty often it is omitted in reading passages, which might make it difficult to understand that the underlined phrase is describing the subject, which in this case is "the book."
Tip 2 - dealing with prepositional phrases
Sometimes, sentences begin with a prepositional phrase to provide more details about the subject. Here's an example with the prepositional phrase underlined:
In the midst of a bustling city, the small park offers a quiet retreat for residents.
In this example, the entire underlined phrase describes "the small park". If you encounter a long sentence starting with a prepositional phrase, separate it and read the main part of the sentence first to understand the main idea, then return to the prepositional phrase for additional details.