TOEFL Experience : Very Long and Slightly Profane

Speaking Section

Now, the speaking. The loud guy from before was making full use of the vocal chords God gave him, and I was sincerely thankful that I was done with listening. The pretty/ugly girl beside me however, wasn’t so lucky.

I practiced this a decent amount too, as I can speak inane crap with my friends non-stop, but I clam up when it comes to formal settings.

Couple of Barron’s exercises for this too, with wall-clock recording.

Now, I hate biology and drawing stuff. As my luck would have it, my listening was dominated with biology-related passages and so was my speaking.

The third topic that I had to talk about for 1 minute had a lot of jargon that I couldn’t note down in time.

I ran out of material to talk about and had even concluded awkwardly, within 30-33 seconds.

I was pretty upset, and accidentally swore “F***ing biology” into the mic. No, I’m not exaggerating this time. No more comments on that.

Always knew cursing like a sailor for every small thing would bite me back in the ass someday.

Somehow managed to push that event out of RAM into the hard disk and proceeded with my writing.

Writing Section

Here again, my main passage was something about the extinction of sea cows and possible environmental causative factors.

Lucky me. I had somehow managed to complete the whole essay writing “sea turtles” for some reason instead of “sea cows”.

Saw this with 30 odd seconds left, after cooling my heels for 5 minutes, admiring myself for exceeding the word limit by a 100 within 15 minutes.

And yeah, just like bomb defusing in the movies, I really managed to finish editing the last “sea turtle” just as the clock hit zero.

Didn’t practice this at all.

If you read a lot, there is a trickle-down effect, unlike with the rich getting richer, and it shows in your writing too.

I had probably written a 100K odd words of a couple of Harry Potter stories on fanfiction websites before, which could’ve helped ; can’t say for sure.

Went home, had that shower that I really needed, and then did god-knows-what. Was fine with the whole thing, although a little apprehensive about the guy somewhere in New Jersey or whatever, who would be grading my colorful language.

So I got 118, and yes, the 2 I lost was in speaking.

Anyway, that’s it. If it helped anyone, great.

If it didn’t, well that’s 10 minutes of your life you ain’t getting back.

Next > TOEFL Preparation for the LAZY people