Customer Reviews

The Official Guide to the New TOEFL iBT with CD-ROM (McGraw-Hill's Official Guide to the New TOEFL Ibt (W/CD))

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

The book is fine, however test samples are easier than real one. Especially for Reading part, I think texts in the book are shorter and more interesting. Also, I felt that in Listening part, pronounciation in real test was less clear, especially of key issues. Maybe 4.5 stars

good book, but the actual exam is a lot harder and longer than the ones in the book

I took Toefl couple of years ago and I didn't wanna study again , however I was not familiar with the new IBT format of the test. This book gave me a quick overview of the new IBT format . Sample questions are really close to actual exam ( I took the real exam couple of days ago). Software in the CD in also exactly what they use for real exam and it gives you experience of real exam day. I recommend this book to those people who wanna know about the format and level of difficulty of standard Toefl.

It's a good book to prepare for the toefl exam. But still you will need alot of practicing. Try to get used to the exam by practicing alot of exams on the toefl website.

This CO doessn't work on window vista. Please don't buy it if you have window vista version

It is an easy an speed way to get familiar with TOEFL exam and know about its tricks.

the exercises in the text are very very intresting, but there are lots of useless repetitions.
for example: in all the corrections all the text they refer to is quoted once more.
it seems to me they did it just to make the book bigger! without all these
repetitions now it would be 1/3 shorter!

This book really helps to practice and know the tips to present the exam, if you read and study it carefully it's possible to get better Toefl scores.

I bought this item mainly because it said there was a full length test in the cd, and that the software was exactly the same as in the test. Well, after studying by the book and taking the test, my thoughts are that the ONE AND ONLY full lenght test is not enough to justify the value of the book. Also, the software is very similar to the test one, but it is NOT EXACTLY the same. Maybe the 3rd edition of this book corrected this...

I was lucky that a friend of mine who was also taking the test bought the Longman book. The Longman has a LOT of questions, divided by skills, full-tests, etc, and all questions are different. In this "Official Guide", there are ONLY the questions of the full-lenght test, and nothing else. The test is indeed complete, and has lots of explanations about what kind of answers do they look for and how do they rate the responses (in the speaking and writing parts), along with various sample answers, which are the main value of the book. The Longman just gave one sample answer for each writing question, and no sample audio to the speaking section.

But if I had to choose only one book to study for the TOEFL, I would choose the Longman because of the higher number of questions.

I cannot comment on the contents of the book itself because I barely opened it (went directly to the CD), but I can say that the questions on the book ARE THE SAME THAT THE ONES ON THE FULL TEST ON THE CD.

This is a good book to prepare for the test, but the readings can be difficult if you don't know all of the vocabulary words. I think it's better to increase your vocabulary first. There's a book, Vocabulary Tools, that helps you to understand how words are made so if you forget what a word means, you can figure it out without a dictionary. After that, the readings will be easier and you can get through them more quickly.