TOEFL Reading Tips and Practice | NOT and EXCEPT Questions

In this lesson, we explain how to answer one kind of question that you may see on the TOEFL Reading section.

The official name of these questions is "Negative Factual Information" questions, but I'm just going to call them NOT and EXCEPT questions, since they will always include the word NOT or EXCEPT in capital letters.

Normally when we answer a question on the TOEFL, the correct answer is provided or implied somewhere in the reading.

NOT and EXCEPT questions are exactly the opposite of this! The correct answer is the one that is not mentioned in the text.

Many students think that makes these questions confusing. But actually these questions are not confusing at all, as long as we know how to approach them in the right way.

How should we approach these questions? It's easy! We want to use a process of elimination We figure out which answer choices are mentioned in the text, and eliminate these. The answer we are left with — the one that isn't mentioned in the text — is the correct one!

That's the basic idea. But we'll go through this step-by-step so you can really master answering these questions.