100 toefl essays pdf

• Free Sample TOEFL Essays

Learning to write well is a skill, like any other. This skill is important not only on your TOEFL exam, but also in your academic and professional career. The TOEFL Writing section consists of two parts:

• Integrated Writing , which includes reading, listening and then writing a summary/ comparison piece of 250 word in 20 minutes
• Independent Writing , which involves writing a four to five-paragraph essay of 300-350 words in 30 minutes

The following free sample TOEFL essays illustrate how to get a high score on the independent writing section of the iBT. By reading through the essays, you can learn how to:

• develop any topic into a well-organized, logical answer
• use synonyms to paraphrase the question
• use a variety of sentence structures & grammatical forms
• begin with a simple, strong introduction
• create body paragraphs that flow logically
• develop unity by linking the body paragraphs
• end with a memorable conclusion

Try to write an essay each day. The added practice will enable you to complete a strong essay, with ease, confidence, and speed, on the day of your TOEFL exam and throughout your life.

• Free Sample TOEFL Essay #1 "Doing Unenjoyable Things"
• Free Sample TOEFL Essay #2 "Money & Success"
• Free Sample TOEFL Essay #3 "Studying Abroad"
• Free Sample TOEFL Essay #4 "Family or Friends More Important?"
• Free Sample TOEFL Essay #5 "Virtual or Real University"
• Free Sample TOEFL Essay #6 "Children & Formal Education"
• Free Sample TOEFL Essay #7 "Household Tasks for Children"

1. TOEFL BASICS

Toefl overview.

• TOEFL Exam Details
• Registration
• Administration

TOEFL iBT Format

2. toefl skills, primary skills.

• Reading Skills
• Listening Skills
• Speaking Skills
• Speaking Tips
• Free TOEFL Speaking Samples
• Writing Skills
• TOEFL Writing Topics

Secondary Skills

• Pronunciation

Support Skills

• Summarizing
• Paraphrasing
• Mind Mapping
• Synthesizing

3. TOEFL RESOURCES

Toefl books, in-class training.

• TOEFL Prep Centres
• ESL Schools

Online Training

Studying toefl abroad, 4. attitude, test anxiety.

• Types of Anxiety
• Causes of Anxiety
• Symptoms of Anxiety
• Reducing Anxiety

5. TOEFL Videos

6. toefl blog.

TOEFL Writing PDF

The Writing section is the last section you’ll face on the TOEFL. By the time you get to the essay portion, you’ll already have spent a couple of hours at the test center, and you’ll have completed the Reading, Listening, and Speaking sections. Understandably, you might be tired and losing your focus. So, how can you make sure you do as well as possible on your TOEFL essays? By being prepared, of course! That’s where this free resource comes in.

In this PDF , you’ll find in-depth information about the Writing section, including:

• the topics you’ll write about
• the differences between the 2 essays
• how to structure your essays (outline included!)
• how to brainstorm effective examples to support your opinions
• pacing strategies so you finish in time
• English grammar tips to help you write at an advanced level
• the most common writing difficulties

View or download the PDF here!

How to use this pdf.

This PDF can be used just like you would any book (or eBook, to be more accurate). 🙂 You can download it and print it out, or save it to your computer / phone / tablet, or read it online. For the most comprehensive help, try to read the book in order. But, if you’re short on time, you can use the links in the table of contents to skip to individual sections.

Once you’ve read through the entire document, we’d suggest checking out our TOEFL practice PDF to put your new skills to the test. And if you want the most complete guidance, including 500+ practice questions (each with an explanation video) and 150 video lessons, Magoosh TOEFL can help !

Happy studying, everyone!

Rachel helps eager students find out about Magoosh. She graduated from UC Berkeley with a super helpful double major in History and French. In her free time she can be found eating peanut butter, drinking five cups of tea per day, and playing with cats.

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Test Resources

TOEFL® Resources by Michael Goodine

Master the toefl writing section in 2024.

The writing section is the final part of the TOEFL ® test.  You’ll have about 30 minutes to answer two writing questions. They are known as the TOEFL Integrated essay , and the TOEFL Writing for an Academic Discussion Task.   You’ll be graded based on your content, organization, grammar and language use. Below are links to my best stuff, or read on for descriptions of each task.

• A Guide to the Integrated Essay
• A Guide to the Writing for an Academic Discussion Task
• Many Practice Questions and Sample Responses
• Complete TOEFL Essay Templates
• A Complete Practice Test (Video)
• The Most Common Grammar Mistakes in TOEFL Essays
• Blog: How Long Should a TOEFL Essay Be?
• Video Lesson: The new TOEFL Writing Question (Writing for an Academic Discussion)
• Video Lesson: The TOEFL Integrated Essay
• Service: TOEFL Essay Evaluation

The TOEFL ® Integrated Essay

The first writing question is the Integrated Essay Task.  For this task, you’ll first read a short article on an academic topic.  Next, you will listen to a short lecture on the same topic. Finally, you’ll have 20 minutes to write an essay that includes details from both sources.  You should write about 280 to 300 words in total.

The Reading

The article will be about 300 words long. It can be about any academic topic that might appear in a first-year university course, but topics related to history and zoology seem to be most common. You’ll be given three minutes to read it and then it will disappear (don’t worry, you’ll be able to see it again when you write the essay). Remember that the article will always have a main argument and three supporting points.  

The Lecture

Next, you will listen to a lecture on the same topic.  It will be about two or three minutes long.  You can only listen once, so try to take detailed notes.  Remember that the lecture will always challenge the article.  This means, for instance, that if the article claims that it is advantageous to explore Mars, the lecture will explain that it is not a good idea to explore Mars.  If the article mentions three problems with using bacteria to clean up oil spills, the lecturer will mention three solutions to these problems. 

Writing Your Essay

Finally, you will be given twenty minutes to write an essay that compares the reading and the lecture.  The question will look something like this: 

“ Summarize the points made in the lecture, being sure to explain how they oppose specific points made in the reading passage. ” 

You can see the article as you write, but you cannot hear the lecture again (or look at a transcript). I recommend that you write between 280 and 300 words in total.  Ignore the “suggested length” mentioned in the instructions.  You should write more than is suggested!

Master Guide

For more help with this task, check out my master guide to the integrated writing task .  It’s got a complete sample question, a sample essay, and a template you can use.

Practice Questions

I’ve created a bunch of practice questions .  They are all free!

The TOEFL ® Writing for an Academic Discussion Task

The second writing question is the Writing for an Academic Discussion Task.

Right away, you’ll see four things on your test screen – instructions for the task, a question written by a university professor about a specific subject, and two student responses to the question.  

The question could be about any subject a student might study at university (sociology, business, political science, education) but subjects in the liberal arts seem most common.  The questions don’t require any background knowledge, however, and can be answered by any test-taker.

You will have ten minutes to read the instructions, read the question, read the responses and write your own response to the question.  There is just one clock for all of this!

A word counter will be displayed as you write. You should write at least 100 words.  I recommend writing a bit more than that. 

For more help with this task, check out my master guide .  It contains a detailed description of the task and an answer template.

How are you Graded?

Your grades come from two separate systems: 

• First, a human rater checks each response based on the official ETS rubrics .  They give you a score from 0 to 5.  The rater’s score is based on your content, organization and language use . 
• Next, the ETS “e-rater” AI  checks each response.  It mostly focuses on structure, grammar, punctuation and vocabulary . 

The scores from the humans and the AI are combined. Then they are converted into a  number from 0 to 30, which is included on your score report. 

Each essay has equal weight.

Get Help – TOEFL Essay Evaluation

• Sign up today to have your practice essays evaluated by a TOEFL writing expert (that’s me).  I’ll check your answers line by line and comment on your grammar, development, argument and vocabulary. I’ll even guess your score.  More importantly, I’ll tell you what you need to do better next time.  Check it out .

Sign Up for an Essay Evaluation Today!

To learn how to beat the toefl, sign up for our essay evaluation service.  in 48 hours, a toefl expert will check your essays line-by-line and tell you how you can do better next time..

Sign up now!

• The exponential growth of solar power will change the world

An energy-rich future is within reach

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I t is 70 years since AT&T ’s Bell Labs unveiled a new technology for turning sunlight into power. The phone company hoped it could replace the batteries that run equipment in out-of-the-way places. It also realised that powering devices with light alone showed how science could make the future seem wonderful; hence a press event at which sunshine kept a toy Ferris wheel spinning round and round.

Today solar power is long past the toy phase. Panels now occupy an area around half that of Wales, and this year they will provide the world with about 6% of its electricity—which is almost three times as much electrical energy as America consumed back in 1954. Yet this historic growth is only the second-most-remarkable thing about the rise of solar power. The most remarkable is that it is nowhere near over.

To call solar power’s rise exponential is not hyperbole, but a statement of fact. Installed solar capacity doubles roughly every three years, and so grows ten-fold each decade. Such sustained growth is seldom seen in anything that matters. That makes it hard for people to get their heads round what is going on. When it was a tenth of its current size ten years ago, solar power was still seen as marginal even by experts who knew how fast it had grown. The next ten-fold increase will be equivalent to multiplying the world’s entire fleet of nuclear reactors by eight in less than the time it typically takes to build just a single one of them.

Solar cells will in all likelihood be the single biggest source of electrical power on the planet by the mid 2030s. By the 2040s they may be the largest source not just of electricity but of all energy. On current trends, the all-in cost of the electricity they produce promises to be less than half as expensive as the cheapest available today. This will not stop climate change, but could slow it a lot faster. Much of the world—including Africa , where 600m people still cannot light their homes—will begin to feel energy-rich. That feeling will be a new and transformational one for humankind.

To grasp that this is not some environmentalist fever dream, consider solar economics. As the cumulative production of a manufactured good increases, costs go down. As costs go down, demand goes up. As demand goes up, production increases—and costs go down further. This cannot go on for ever; production, demand or both always become constrained. In earlier energy transitions—from wood to coal, coal to oil or oil to gas—the efficiency of extraction grew, but it was eventually offset by the cost of finding ever more fuel.

As our essay this week explains, solar power faces no such constraint. The resources needed to produce solar cells and plant them on solar farms are silicon-rich sand, sunny places and human ingenuity, all three of which are abundant. Making cells also takes energy, but solar power is fast making that abundant, too. As for demand, it is both huge and elastic—if you make electricity cheaper, people will find uses for it. The result is that, in contrast to earlier energy sources, solar power has routinely become cheaper and will continue to do so.

Other constraints do exist. Given people’s proclivity for living outside daylight hours, solar power needs to be complemented with storage and supplemented by other technologies. Heavy industry and aviation and freight have been hard to electrify. Fortunately, these problems may be solved as batteries and fuels created by electrolysis gradually become cheaper.

Another worry is that the vast majority of the world’s solar panels, and almost all the purified silicon from which they are made, come from China. Its solar industry is highly competitive, heavily subsidised and is outstripping current demand—quite an achievement given all the solar capacity China is installing within its own borders. This means that Chinese capacity is big enough to keep the expansion going for years to come, even if some of the companies involved go to the wall and some investment dries up.

In the long run, a world in which more energy is generated without the oil and gas that come from unstable or unfriendly parts of the world will be more dependable. Still, although the Chinese Communist Party cannot rig the price of sunlight as OPEC tries to rig that of oil, the fact that a vital industry resides in a single hostile country is worrying.

It is a concern that America feels keenly, which is why it has put tariffs on Chinese solar equipment. However, because almost all the demand for solar panels still lies in the future, the rest of the world will have plenty of scope to get into the market. America’s adoption of solar energy could be frustrated by a pro-fossil-fuel Trump presidency, but only temporarily and painfully. It could equally be enhanced if America released pent up demand, by making it easier to install panels on homes and to join the grid—the country has a terawatt of new solar capacity waiting to be connected. Carbon prices would help, just as they did in the switch from coal to gas in the European Union.

The aim should be for the virtuous circle of solar-power production to turn as fast as possible. That is because it offers the prize of cheaper energy. The benefits start with a boost to productivity. Anything that people use energy for today will cost less—and that includes pretty much everything. Then come the things cheap energy will make possible. People who could never afford to will start lighting their houses or driving a car. Cheap energy can purify water, and even desalinate it. It can drive the hungry machinery of artificial intelligence. It can make billions of homes and offices more bearable in summers that will, for decades to come, be getting hotter.

But it is the things that nobody has yet thought of that will be most consequential. In its radical abundance, cheaper energy will free the imagination, setting tiny Ferris wheels of the mind spinning with excitement and new possibilities.

This week marks the summer solstice in the northern hemisphere. The Sun rising to its highest point in the sky will in decades to come shine down on a world where nobody need go without the blessings of electricity and where the access to energy invigorates all those it touches. ■

For subscribers only: to see how we design each week’s cover, sign up to our weekly  Cover Story newsletter .

This article appeared in the Leaders section of the print edition under the headline “The solar age”

Leaders June 22nd 2024

• AI will transform the character of warfare
• Emmanuel Macron’s project of reform is at risk
• How to tax billionaires—and how not to
• Javier Milei’s next move could make his presidency—or break it
• India should liberate its cities and create more states

From the June 22nd 2024 edition

Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents

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