I picked up Mometrix Media’s “TOEFL iBT 2024-2025 Preparation Book” a few months ago. TOEFL books by real publishers are hard to come by these days, so I think it is important to check out the small press stuff like this which frequently shows up in the Amazon charts. As I write this, Mometrix’s book is the second best selling TOEFL book, behind only the Official Guide to the TOEFL. But is it any good?
To cut to the chase: this is a surprisingly terrible TOEFL preparation book.
Very little in this book is accurate.
Take the first practice reading passage, for example. The article itself (about the succession to Elizabeth I) looks like a TOEFL reading passage to some extent, but of the 14 questions that follow only 6 resemble what one might find on the real TOEFL. The other reading passages are just as bad.
And, yes, the passage contains 14 questions even though the real test only contains 10 questions per passage.
The practice speaking sets in the book have the same problem; though the speaking section was reduced to 4 questions back in 2019, the book follows the old 6-question model. Though the author indicates that this was done “to help you practice as much as possible,” there is no indication of which question types were removed from the test.
Finally, let’s turn to the writing practice. Though the independent writing question was removed from the test in 2023, it is still present in this book (which was published in 2024). The new “writing for an academic discussion” task is not mentioned. For what it’s worth, the provided integrated writing question isn’t even close to accurate. In this instance, the lecture elaborates on the reading topic in a general way instead of opposing it as it would on the real test.
All-in-all, the book is focused on a practice test that is less accurate than what ChatGTP could produce with minimal prompting.
Outside of this one (inaccurate) practice test there isn’t much else in the book. Readers will find some general study tips which are generic enough to (probably) appear in other Mometrix books, lists of suffixes and prefixes, writing strategies of a very general type, a list of idioms and a few pages about how to overcome test-related anxiety. None of this stuff is particularly useful. Most of it feels recycled.
I don’t recommend this book.
