TOEIC Is Not Just About English Skills — Part 5 Taught Me How to Save Time — Wednesday, July 22, 2026, Reiwa8

Today, I studied Part 5 of The Complete Guide to the New TOEIC Test: Last-Minute Techniques, a book published more than twenty years ago by Robert Hilke, Paul Wadden, and Hiro Maeda.

Today's lesson focused on two types of "questions you can answer without reading the entire sentence": prepositions and small conjunctions.

At first, I wondered, "Is it really okay to study English this way?" However, I realized once again that the TOEIC test has a different purpose from high school English.

In high school, the goal was to understand grammar and sentence structure. In contrast, the TOEIC test requires you to answer 200 questions within a limited amount of time. Therefore, questions that can be answered instantly without careful reading should be finished as quickly as possible, allowing more time for the reading passages in Part 7, where higher scores are often earned.

For prepositions, I reviewed expressions such as:

- in the newspaper
- in the magazine
- in the journal

These reminded me that in is used with printed publications.

On the other hand:

- on the radio
- on television
- on the Internet

show that on is used with broadcast and electronic media.

I also learned that many preposition questions depend simply on whether you know the correct expression. If you do not know it, spending extra time thinking usually will not help. It is much more effective to memorize these expressions and move on without hesitation.

Next, I studied small conjunctions.

In TOEIC, some questions can be answered simply by recognizing fixed pairs of words before even reading the meaning of the sentence.

For example:

- both A and B
- either A or B
- neither A nor B
- not only A but also B

These expressions are also taught in high school English. However, in TOEIC, the key is not to analyze the meaning but to recognize the matching pair immediately and answer without delay.

The authors recommend solving these questions in about five seconds.

At first, that sounded quite demanding. However, I came to understand that in TOEIC, it is not enough to answer correctly. The real skill is to answer correctly as quickly as possible.

Although this book was published more than twenty years ago, I found that these strategies are still highly effective for today's TOEIC test.

Once again, I realized that success on the TOEIC test depends not only on English ability but also on using your time wisely.

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