Complete TOEIC Preparation Strategy - Score 900+ Points

Achieving a high TOEIC score requires more than just good English skills—it demands strategic preparation, understanding of test formats, and consistent practice. Whether you're aiming for 600, 750, or the coveted 900+ score, this comprehensive guide will help you maximize your TOEIC performance.

## Understanding the TOEIC Test Format

The TOEIC test evaluates your English proficiency in a business context through four key sections:

### TOEIC Listening (100 questions - 45 minutes)
- **Part 1:** Photographs (6 questions)
- **Part 2:** Question-Response (25 questions)
- **Part 3:** Conversations (39 questions)
- **Part 4:** Talks (30 questions)

### TOEIC Reading (100 questions - 75 minutes)
- **Part 5:** Incomplete Sentences (30 questions)
- **Part 6:** Text Completion (16 questions)
- **Part 7:** Reading Comprehension (54 questions)

> **Pro Tip:** Time management is crucial. Practice with timed tests to build your pace and endurance.

## Proven Strategies for Each Section

### Listening Section Strategies

**Part 1 - Photographs:**
1. Look at the photo carefully before the audio begins
2. Focus on people, objects, and actions in the image
3. Eliminate obviously wrong answers quickly
4. Watch out for similar-sounding words (sound traps)

**Part 2 - Question-Response:**
- Listen for WH-questions (who, what, when, where, why, how)
- Pay attention to the first word of each response
- Avoid responses that repeat words from the question
- Stay focused—there are no visuals to help guide you

**Parts 3 & 4 - Conversations and Talks:**
1. Read the questions before the audio starts
2. Listen for keywords related to the questions
3. Take brief notes on key information
4. Don't get stuck on missed questions—move on quickly

### Reading Section Strategies

**Part 5 - Incomplete Sentences:**
- Identify the grammar point being tested
- Look for clues in surrounding words
- Eliminate answers that don't fit grammatically
- Don't spend more than 30 seconds per question

**Part 6 - Text Completion:**
- Read the entire passage first for context
- Look for coherence and logical flow
- Pay attention to transition words and phrases
- Consider the overall tone and purpose

**Part 7 - Reading Comprehension:**
1. Skim the passage for main ideas first
2. Read questions carefully and identify key information
3. Scan back to find specific details
4. Manage your time—allow 1 minute per question

## Essential Study Techniques

### 1. Build Your Vocabulary Systematically

Focus on **business and workplace vocabulary** that frequently appears in TOEIC:

- **Finance:** budget, revenue, expenses, profit, investment
- **Human Resources:** recruit, promote, benefits, performance review
- **Marketing:** campaign, target audience, brand awareness, market share
- **Technology:** upgrade, implement, software, database, network

### 2. Practice Active Listening

Improve your listening skills with these methods:
- Listen to **business English podcasts** daily
- Watch **English news** and documentaries
- Practice **shadowing** (repeating what you hear simultaneously)
- Use **dictation exercises** to improve accuracy

### 3. Develop Reading Speed and Comprehension

Enhance your reading abilities through:
- **Speed reading exercises** with business articles
- **Skimming and scanning** practice
- Reading **English newspapers** (business sections)
- **Time-limited reading** to build pace

## Score Improvement Targets

Understanding score ranges helps set realistic goals:

- **600-695:** Lower Intermediate (Basic workplace communication)
- **700-795:** Intermediate (Effective workplace communication)
- **800-895:** Advanced (Proficient workplace communication)
- **900-990:** Expert (Highly proficient workplace communication)

### What Each Score Level Means

**700+ Score Benefits:**
- Qualification for many international companies
- Enhanced career advancement opportunities
- University admission requirements satisfaction
- Professional certification eligibility

**800+ Score Advantages:**
- Leadership position qualifications
- International assignment opportunities
- Scholarship and grant eligibility
- Premium job market access

## Test Day Success Tips

### Before the Test
- Get a good night's sleep
- Eat a proper breakfast
- Arrive early to familiarize yourself with the testing environment
- Bring required identification and materials

### During the Test
- **Stay calm and focused**—anxiety can hurt performance
- **Manage your time** carefully in each section
- **Don't leave answers blank**—guess intelligently if needed
- **Trust your first instinct** when unsure

## Final Thoughts

Success in TOEIC requires **consistent practice**, **strategic preparation**, and **familiarity with test formats**. Start your preparation today with our comprehensive practice platform to achieve your target score.

**Ready to begin?** Take our free diagnostic test to discover your current level and create a personalized study plan.

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## What to expect from here on out

What follows from here is just a bunch of absolute nonsense I've written to dogfood the plugin itself. It includes every sensible typographic element I could think of, like **bold text**, unordered lists, ordered lists, code blocks, block quotes, _and even italics_.

It's important to cover all of these use cases for a few reasons:

1. We want everything to look good out of the box.
2. Really just the first reason, that's the whole point of the plugin.
3. Here's a third pretend reason though a list with three items looks more realistic than a list with two items.

Now we're going to try out another header style.

### Typography should be easy

So that's a header for you — with any luck if we've done our job correctly that will look pretty reasonable.

Something a wise person once told me about typography is:

> Typography is pretty important if you don't want your stuff to look like trash. Make it good then it won't be bad.

It's probably important that images look okay here by default as well:

Contrary to popular belief, Lorem Ipsum is not simply random text. It has roots in a piece of classical Latin literature from 45 BC, making it over 2000 years old.

Now I'm going to show you an example of an unordered list to make sure that looks good, too:

- So here is the first item in this list.
- In this example we're keeping the items short.
- Later, we'll use longer, more complex list items.

And that's the end of this section.

## What if we stack headings?

### We should make sure that looks good, too.

Sometimes you have headings directly underneath each other. In those cases you often have to undo the top margin on the second heading because it usually looks better for the headings to be closer together than a paragraph followed by a heading should be.

### When a heading comes after a paragraph …

When a heading comes after a paragraph, we need a bit more space, like I already mentioned above. Now let's see what a more complex list would look like.

- **I often do this thing where list items have headings.**

For some reason I think this looks cool which is unfortunate because it's pretty annoying to get the styles right.

I often have two or three paragraphs in these list items, too, so the hard part is getting the spacing between the paragraphs, list item heading, and separate list items to all make sense. Pretty tough honestly, you could make a strong argument that you just shouldn't write this way.

- **Since this is a list, I need at least two items.**

I explained what I'm doing already in the previous list item, but a list wouldn't be a list if it only had one item, and we really want this to look realistic. That's why I've added this second list item so I actually have something to look at when writing the styles.

- **It's not a bad idea to add a third item either.**

I think it probably would've been fine to just use two items but three is definitely not worse, and since I seem to be having no trouble making up arbitrary things to type, I might as well include it.

After this sort of list I usually have a closing statement or paragraph, because it kinda looks weird jumping right to a heading.

## Code should look okay by default.

I think most people are going to use [highlight.js](https://highlightjs.org/) or [Prism](https://prismjs.com/) or something if they want to style their code blocks but it wouldn't hurt to make them look _okay_ out of the box, even with no syntax highlighting.

Here's what a default `tailwind.config.js` file looks like at the time of writing:

```js
module.exports = {
purge: [],
theme: {
extend: {},
},
variants: {},
plugins: [],
};
```

Hopefully that looks good enough to you.

### What about nested lists?

Nested lists basically always look bad which is why editors like Medium don't even let you do it, but I guess since some of you goofballs are going to do it we have to carry the burden of at least making it work.

1. **Nested lists are rarely a good idea.**
- You might feel like you are being really "organized" or something but you are just creating a gross shape on the screen that is hard to read.
- Nested navigation in UIs is a bad idea too, keep things as flat as possible.
- Nesting tons of folders in your source code is also not helpful.
2. **Since we need to have more items, here's another one.**
- I'm not sure if we'll bother styling more than two levels deep.
- Two is already too much, three is guaranteed to be a bad idea.
- If you nest four levels deep you belong in prison.
3. **Two items isn't really a list, three is good though.**
- Again please don't nest lists if you want people to actually read your content.
- Nobody wants to look at this.
- I'm upset that we even have to bother styling this.

The most annoying thing about lists in Markdown is that `<li>` elements aren't given a child `<p>` tag unless there are multiple paragraphs in the list item. That means I have to worry about styling that annoying situation too.

- **For example, here's another nested list.**

But this time with a second paragraph.

- These list items won't have `<p>` tags
- Because they are only one line each

- **But in this second top-level list item, they will.**

This is especially annoying because of the spacing on this paragraph.

- As you can see here, because I've added a second line, this list item now has a `<p>` tag.

This is the second line I'm talking about by the way.

- Finally here's another list item so it's more like a list.

- A closing list item, but with no nested list, because why not?

And finally a sentence to close off this section.

## There are other elements we need to style

I almost forgot to mention links, like [this link to the Tailwind CSS website](https://tailwindcss.com). We almost made them blue but that's so yesterday, so we went with dark gray, feels edgier.

We even included table styles, check it out:

| Wrestler | Origin | Finisher |
| ----------------------- | ------------ | ------------------ |
| Bret "The Hitman" Hart | Calgary, AB | Sharpshooter |
| Stone Cold Steve Austin | Austin, TX | Stone Cold Stunner |
| Randy Savage | Sarasota, FL | Elbow Drop |
| Vader | Boulder, CO | Vader Bomb |
| Razor Ramon | Chuluota, FL | Razor's Edge |

We also need to make sure inline code looks good, like if I wanted to talk about `<span>` elements or tell you the good news about `@tailwindcss/typography`.

### Sometimes I even use `code` in headings

Even though it's probably a bad idea, and historically I've had a hard time making it look good. This _"wrap the code blocks in backticks"_ trick works pretty well though really.

Another thing I've done in the past is put a `code` tag inside of a link, like if I wanted to tell you about the [`tailwindcss/docs`](https://github.com/tailwindcss/docs) repository. I don't love that there is an underline below the backticks but it is absolutely not worth the madness it would require to avoid it.

#### We haven't used an `h4` yet

But now we have. Please don't use `h5` or `h6` in your content, Medium only supports two heading levels for a reason, you animals. I honestly considered using a `before` pseudo-element to scream at you if you use an `h5` or `h6`.

We don't style them at all out of the box because `h4` elements are already so small that they are the same size as the body copy. What are we supposed to do with an `h5`, make it _smaller_ than the body copy? No thanks.

### We still need to think about stacked headings though.

#### Let's make sure we don't screw that up with `h4` elements, either.

Phew, with any luck we have styled the headings above this text and they look pretty good.

Let's add a closing paragraph here so things end with a decently sized block of text. I can't explain why I want things to end that way but I have to assume it's because I think things will look weird or unbalanced if there is a heading too close to the end of the document.

What I've written here is probably long enough, but adding this final sentence can't hurt.

## GitHub Flavored Markdown

I've also added support for GitHub Flavored Mardown using `remark-gfm`.

With `remark-gfm`, we get a few extra features in our markdown. Example: autolink literals.

A link like www.example.com or https://example.com would automatically be converted into an `a` tag.

This works for email links too: contact@example.com.