TAKE It For Granted

This month I've been helping Keiko study for her TOEIC* exam at the end of June.

TOEIC - the Test Of English for International Communication** - is a Universal guide for employers to know your English ability, although it is mainly used in Japan. A particular flaw is that it in no way measures your communicative ability - my experience as a teacher taught me that some students arrogantly believe they are great because their TOEIC score was high but they couldn't even reply to a simple "How are you?" question.

Still, a good score goes a long way - 990 being the top. The test takes nearly all day, is held every other month in hundreds of locations and 1000s of people pay about £30 to take it each time.

TOEIC is divided into seven parts:

Listening
- Answering questions about photographs
- Question response
- Answering questions about short conversations
- Answering questions about short talks

Reading
- Incomplete sentences
- Text completion
- Reading comprehension

It actually gets very difficult towards the end and native speakers aren't expected to get a perfect 990. Some of it is fascinating, for example, the 'incomplete sentence' section has a part in which you have to fill in the correct phrasal verbs, e.g.

The lawyer called me to ____ a meeting.
a) set on
b) set up
c) set to
d) set in

It may seem easy but there's no way a non-native can really guess, as the answer can only be known through experience. To defend this point, take a few phrasal verbs from the two words 'take' and 'look':

take over, take in, take up, take care of, take off, take on, take out, take back
look after, look for, look up to, look into, look on, look back on, look out for

Who knew there were so many!?

*pronounced Toe-ick, as in "foot-finger" and "gross"
**why does the O count but not the F?