Listening Tips
TOEFL 2026 — the most practiced Listening questions, September 2026
How this list was measured
Every entry below is ranked by the number of different Reach120 learners who submitted an answer to it during September 2026 — not by how often the question was shown, and not by anything anyone chose to feature. One learner practicing the same question repeatedly counts once.
A question needs at least 3 different learners to appear at all, a task type needs at least 5 such questions before it is ranked, and Listening needs at least 10 learners in the month before this post is generated.
At most 8 questions per task type are listed.
Two things are removed before anything is counted, so that nothing in this order was put there by us: Reach120's own accounts — staff, test users and the internal harnesses that exercise the product — and the fallback questions the app hands out when there is no question bank to draw from, which measure our own placement rather than anybody's choice.
The exact learner counts are deliberately not published — the order is the finding, the headcount is not. This ranking measures practice, not opinion: it is not a vote and it is not a quality judgement by us or by ETS. Where a question has separately been rated by enough learners or tutors to carry a verification mark, that mark is shown next to it and explained at the end.
Try it — one real Listening item
This recording and question come from the same bank Reach120 learners practice against. Read the transcript or play the audio, then answer — Listening is free and unlimited on every account.
A Missing Scholarship Document
Show the transcript
- Student: I got an email saying my scholarship is on hold because a document is missing. I thought I submitted everything.
- Coordinator: Let me look. Yes, we have your application and transcript, but the financial verification form hasn't come through.
- Student: I emailed that two weeks ago.
- Coordinator: Emailed attachments sometimes don't attach to the file correctly. The safest way is to upload it through the scholarship portal directly.
- Student: Is it too late? The email mentioned a deadline.
- Coordinator: The hard deadline is Friday. If you upload it today, you're fine, and the hold lifts once we verify it, usually within a day.
- Student: Okay, I'll do it right now to be safe.
- Coordinator: Good plan. Keep the confirmation number the portal gives you, just in case.
Why C is the answer: The coordinator explains emailed attachments sometimes don't attach correctly, so uploading directly is safer.
- A. No fee is associated with email.
- B. The Friday deadline still applies.
- D. No shutdown of email is mentioned.
Listening stimuli
1. Help Carrying Boxes
Kind: choose_response
Subject area: campus daily life
How it opens: Could you help me carry these boxes up to the third-floor office?
2. Asking About Office Hours
Kind: choose_response
Subject area: campus daily life
How it opens: Do you happen to know if Professor Lee holds office hours today?
3. Warning About Wet Floor
Kind: choose_response
Subject area: campus daily life
How it opens: Careful, the floor by the entrance is still wet from mopping.
4. Offering to Save a Seat
Kind: choose_response
Subject area: campus daily life
How it opens: I can save you a seat up front if you're running late.
5. Offering a Ride Home
Kind: choose_response
Subject area: campus daily life
How it opens: I'm driving past your dorm later if you want a ride home.
6. Asking to Borrow a Charger
Kind: choose_response
Subject area: campus daily life
How it opens: Any chance I could borrow your phone charger for a few minutes?
7. The Secret of Roman Concrete
Kind: lecture
Subject area: materials science
How it opens: Here's a fact that puzzled engineers for a long time. Some Roman concrete structures, harbor walls that have sat in seawater for two thousand years, are still standing, while modern concrete piers can crumble in mere decades. So what did the Romans know? Let's dig in. Modern concrete is designed to be inert; ideally,…
8. Offering to Lend Notes
Kind: choose_response
Subject area: campus daily life
How it opens: I can lend you my notes from the class you missed on Tuesday.
Practice Listening stimuli on Reach120
About the verification marks
No question in this list carries a verification mark yet. A mark is earned from learner and tutor ratings, which are still accumulating, so an unmarked question here means "not yet rated enough" — not "rated badly".
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