How do I practice TOEFL Complete the Words?

What do you do in TOEFL Complete the Words?

Complete the Words is a Reading task in which you fill in the missing letters of 10 words whose second halves have been deleted within one paragraph. ETS "Updated TOEFL iBT Test Overview" (no publication date, cover © 2026, checked 2026-10-30; hereafter the Test Overview) says on page 5 that in an academic paragraph of about 70 to 100 words, the first sentence is left intact, and after that the second half of every other word is deleted. Each passage has 10 blank words (same page).

Page 12 of the Technical Manual calls this format a C-test (a reading test format that deletes the second part of words and asks you to fill in the missing letters). The same page says passages are selected from authentic texts written by native speakers of English and then edited, and that each passage is made self-contained, so its meaning does not depend on other texts before or after it. Topics are chosen to be familiar to everyone, and texts that rely on technical terms or use many proper nouns, texts in chat style and transcribed conversations are not used (same page).

ETS says this task measures the abilities below.

• ETS "TOEFL iBT Reading Section" page (no publication date, checked 2026-10-30): vocabulary knowledge and the ability to work out meaning from context.
• ETS "TOEFL iBT Test: 2026 Update Test Blueprint and Specifications Document" (no publication date, checked 2026-10-30; hereafter the Specifications Document), page 4: the ability to use word-order rules, vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension to produce text that makes sense.
• Technical Manual, page 10: foundational tasks such as filling in missing letters were chosen to gather information about overall English ability quickly and reliably.

The Reading rationale statements on page 8 of the Specifications Document include one about filling in predictable gaps using basic knowledge of spelling and word forms (A1 to A2) and one about inferring missing words or phrases from morphological and syntactic clues (B1 to B2). Neither statement is labeled with a task name.

We state who does the scoring once, in this paragraph. Complete the Words is machine scored (scored by matching the correct answer or by rules set in advance) (Specifications Document, page 4; page 3, note 4). Page 34 of the Technical Manual says Reading items are scored 1 point if correct and 0 points if incorrect, and that the section raw score is converted to a scaled score through equating (a statistical procedure that puts scores from test forms of different difficulty on the same scale). The same page says the reported score is not the same as the number or percentage of questions answered correctly. How the 1 to 6 bands correspond to the comparable 0 to 120 total score is covered in the Unlock Prep (unlockprep.com) guide "How do TOEFL 1 to 6 scores compare with 0 to 120 scores?".

Because the number of blank words in one passage and the number of scored items in each module are both 10, we read each blank word as one item. ETS does not state this correspondence in a single sentence. Read this way, a blank where you get some letters right but do not complete the whole word scores 0 (raw score).

The sample paragraph on page 5 of the Test Overview shows three features. There is one underline for each deleted letter, and in words with an odd number of letters, the deleted part is one letter longer than the part that is left. After the tenth blank, the words are left without deletions. The screen example in Figure 1 on page 13 of the Technical Manual also leaves the text after the tenth blank undeleted. We have not reproduced the words of the sample item in this article.

Where does Complete the Words appear in the adaptive modules?

Complete the Words appears in both the first and the second Reading module, and it has 10 scored items whether the second module is lower or upper (Technical Manual, page 29, Table 1). Reading is two-stage adaptive (the difficulty of the second module depends on your performance in the first module). Page 28 of the Technical Manual says the first module is built from medium-difficulty tasks (CEFR B1 or B2), and that doing well on the first module leads to a harder second module.

The numbers in the table are scored items, and the source is Table 1 on page 29 of the Technical Manual. "Lower" and "upper" refer to the Lower Module and the Upper Module. On either path, Complete the Words has 20 scored items, the largest share of the 35 scored Reading items (same table).

Page 28 of the Technical Manual says the Reading score takes into account both the number of questions answered correctly in the two modules and the difficulty of the modules on the path. The same page says Reading modules may include 15 unscored questions, and it does not say which questions they are. Reading takes about 30 minutes in total (Test Overview, page 4), and pages 2 and 4 of the Specifications Document give 18 to 21 minutes for the first module and 9 minutes for the second module. How the second module is chosen and how to read your score are covered in "TOEFL adaptive testing: can your score be low after an upper module?".

Where do you lose points on the blanks?

We think points on the blanks are lost on words that seem to fit the number of spaces but do not fit the surrounding grammar or context. The passage and sets below, from the Unlock Prep editorial team, are an example we wrote for illustration. They follow the format described on page 5 of the Test Overview (an intact first sentence, the second half of every other word deleted, 10 blank words), and no ETS items are reproduced. The passage content is for illustration only and is not meant as factual material. Each deleted letter is shown as one _.

Many cities around the world are now planting more trees along their busy streets. These tr_ _ _ offer impo_ _ _ _ _ benefits i_ hot wea_ _ _ _. The sh_ _ _ of la_ _ _ trees red_ _ _ _ the he_ _ on nea_ _ _ sidewalks, a_ _ their leaves release water into the air, which cools it further on summer afternoons. For this reason, many cities now protect older trees from being cut down and plant young ones to replace any that die.

Answer words (10): trees · important · in · weather · shade · large · reduces · heat · nearby · and (a passage of about 70 words).

Set 1: Part of speech (nea_ _ _)

• Wrong fill: nearly
• Right fill: nearby
• Why: The next word, sidewalks, is a noun, so the slot before it is for an adjective that modifies a noun. Nearly is an adverb meaning "almost" and cannot modify a noun directly. Both words leave three spaces, so the number of spaces does not tell them apart.

Set 2: Word form (red_ _ _ _)

• Wrong fill: reduce
• Right fill: reduces
• Why: The subject of this verb is The shade (singular), and trees, just before the verb, sits inside the modifier introduced by of. The subject is third person singular and the tense is present, so the verb takes -s. If you fill in reduce, one space is left over.

Set 3: Context (he_ _)

• Wrong fill: help
• Right fill: heat
• Why: The slot after the is a noun slot, so both words fit the grammar and leave the same number of spaces. Hot weather in the previous sentence and cools it further in the undeleted later part are about heat, so heat goes here. A sentence saying the shade reduces "help" does not make sense.

Set 4: Short word (i_)

• Wrong fill: is
• Right fill: in
• Why: This sentence already has the verb offer, so there is no slot for a second verb. Before hot weather, the preposition in, which shows time, goes here.

Of the four sets, only Set 2 can be decided by the number of spaces. In the other three, both words have the same number of spaces, so you have to decide using the surrounding grammar and context.

What has ETS not disclosed?

ETS has disclosed the passage format, the number of blank words, the number of scored items per module and 1 or 0 scoring for Complete the Words, but the ETS documents we checked do not give the time for this task alone or the criteria for a correct answer on a single word. Below is what we did not find after reading pages 1 to 28 of the Test Overview, pages 1 to 18 of the Specifications Document, pages 1 to 68 of the Technical Manual (including searches for Complete the Words, C-test, missing and truncated), the 2026-27 "TOEFL iBT Information Bulletin", and the ets.org Reading Section, Test Content and Prepare pages (2026-10-30).

• The time assigned to Complete the Words on its own (ETS gives only about 30 minutes for Reading and the time for each module).
• A sentence that directly states how many passages appear in one test.
• A sentence that directly states that one blank word is one item.
• Where Complete the Words comes in the order of tasks within a module.
• Whether every item shows one space per deleted letter, as in the sample.
• Whether an answer with one misspelled letter, or a different word that also makes sense, is counted as correct (Technical Manual page 34 lists only two outcomes, correct and incorrect).
• The numbers in the conversion table from raw scores to the 1 to 6 bands (Technical Manual page 34 explains the method, building a conversion table for each test form through IRT (item response theory) true-score equating, but does not print the tables).
• Which items are unscored.

Where sources differ: the Reading raw score range differs between documents.

The 35 scored items per path in Table 1 on page 29 of the Technical Manual match the figure of 35. This article does not calculate scores from these numbers. The 30 for Complete the Words on pages 2 and 4 of the Specifications Document includes unscored questions, while the 20 on page 29 of the Technical Manual is the number of scored items on each path. We did not find a source that breaks down, task by task, what makes up the difference between the two numbers. Page 3 of the Specifications Document still says minor changes may be made before launch. What ETS has and has not disclosed across all four sections is collected in "The 2026 TOEFL iBT four sections: what ETS has and has not disclosed".

In what order should I practice?

In our view, rather than filling in the blanks straight away from the start, getting the meaning of the whole passage first and then checking the grammatical slot of each blank can reduce the kinds of mistakes shown in the four sets above.

1. First read the first sentence and the undeleted sentences at the end to get the topic of the passage (Set 3).
2. For each blank, use the words before and after it to decide its slot. A slot after an article or adjective takes a noun, a slot before a noun takes an adjective, and a slot after a subject takes a verb (Sets 1 and 4).
3. If it is a verb slot, find the subject and match number and tense. If a modifier sits between the subject and the verb, do not make the verb agree with a noun inside the modifier (Set 2).
4. Write the remaining letters out in full with correct spelling. If the spaces are shown, check that the number of letters you wrote equals the number of spaces.
5. After filling in every blank, read the paragraph once from the beginning to check that the meaning flows.

You can also make your own practice passages. Choose an English paragraph of 70 to 100 words with few technical terms, keep the first sentence, and starting from the second sentence, delete the second half of every other word for ten words. Fill it in a day later, and for each blank you missed, note whether it went wrong on part of speech, form, context or spelling; that tells you where to look first in your next practice.