Quiz-Tree

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Key TOEFL Verbs 1

This set covers two groups of verbs that come up often in TOEFL reading and writing passages: words that describe how one thing influences or causes another — such as escalate, engender, and exacerbate — and words that describe how ideas, boundaries, and categories are named and organized — such as delineate, designate, and codify.

1. Start Here

The distractors in this quiz are clearly wrong — your main job is to learn what each word means in context. By the end, you should be able to place all eight verbs in a sentence without hesitation.
8 questions
average score: 77% (all users)

2. Beginner

Watch out for engender, generate, and stimulate — they all relate to producing or causing something, but they are not interchangeable. By the end, you should be able to explain what makes each one the right or wrong fit in a given sentence.
8 questions
average score: 76% (all users)

3. Intermediate

Three words in this quiz — denote, designate, and delineate — look and sound similar but mean different things. By the end, you should be able to identify which one belongs in a sentence without confusing them.
8 questions
average score: 62% (all users)

4. Advanced 🔒

Several questions pair the target word against a near-synonym that almost fits. By the end, you should be able to articulate why escalate is not the same as exacerbate, and why elicit is not the same as affect.
8 questions
average score: 69% (all users)

5. Expert 🔒

This is the hardest quiz in the set — every question includes at least two distractors drawn directly from the word list. By the end, you should be able to distinguish delineate, designate, and denote from one another and explain the difference in context.
8 questions
average score: 66% (all users)

The five quizzes test all 21 words in context, and each word comes up at least twice across the set so you have more than one chance to get it right. The quizzes get harder as you go: the first ones have a clear correct answer, while the later ones include words that are close in meaning and need more careful reading to tell apart.

Every answer option includes an explanation, so the questions you get wrong are just as useful as the ones you get right. Go through the quizzes in order the first time — they are designed to build on each other and prepare you for the level of vocabulary you will see on the TOEFL.