Strategy for achieving a higher score in answering question No. 4 in TOEFL speaking

　　A number of test takers treat question No.4 in TOEFL speaking as a dead bomb because of their relatively poor listening ability. However, for some advanced TOEFL learners, achieveing a "Good Level Answer" for question No. 4 is also a tough task.

　　Of course, there is no problem for them to provide comprehensive conclusion on the definition of a specific term and details in the lecture are not the so called "Bottleneck". Within 60 seconds, they are confident about speaking out all the key points and maybe sometimes, five to seven seconds are left.

　　Here comes the problem. Before giving the response, let's take a look at the question the narrator illustrates: "The professor gives an example of his son in the lecture. Explain how the example demonstrates the concept of overconfidence effect". Therefore, we can see from the sentence above that our major responsibility is to clearly state the relationship between the examples we heard and the definition of the term we read. This is a higher requirement for all TOEFL test takers. If we only numerate the details we hear but cannot effectively provide the inner connection, or the logic of our utterance, it seems that our answers are pale and not convincing.

　　Thus, in order to improve our answer from the "Fair Level" to the "Good Level", we need to add one more sentence, namely, "In this case/ (these) example (s)/ experiment,". After this, we should combine the examples we heard with the highlighted words in the definition. It is similar with making a conclusion, but not identical. As to making a conclusion, we just need to collect the most important issues we mentioned above and try to make it concise. But in order to state the "Principle", we should learn to PARAPHRASE. Take the "Overconfidence Effect" which has been tested on April 9th, 2011 for example. The last sentence in our speaking should be, "In this example, the professor's son finally benefited from his overconfidence in finding a promising job, even though it might result in failure in the beginning."

　　Definitely, the major premise of this requirement comes to the ability of time management. Test takers should pay special attention to the timer on the screen. They should leave six to eight seconds for this principle sentence and do not have to finish in a rush.