Updated 2026-08-23intermediate

TOEFL Reading Practice #012 — The Treatment With Nothing In It

Free TOEFL Reading practice: The Treatment With Nothing In It. 11 questions with a full passage and answer key.

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How to use this practice: Read the passage once without a dictionary, then answer the questions on your own. Tap “Answer” under each question to reveal just the correct letter — no explanations, so you can keep testing yourself.
1

Passage

Read the full passage. Bracketed letters like [A] mark the four positions for the insert-text question.

The Treatment With Nothing In It

¶1 A placebo is a treatment that contains no active medicine — a sugar pill, a saline injection, or a procedure that does nothing to the body. The placebo effect is what happens when a person's symptoms genuinely improve simply because the person believes a fake treatment will work. It shows up most often with pain, nausea, tiredness, and other symptoms that the brain has some control over. In the early 1940s, an army doctor named Henry Beecher saw the effect firsthand at a field hospital in Anzio. When the army ran out of morphine, a nurse injected a badly wounded soldier with ordinary salt water instead. His pain eased anyway, as if he had received the real drug.

¶2 The strange part of the placebo effect is that the improvement is not just imagined. Expecting relief can cause the brain to release its own natural painkillers, so the body responds to the belief, not only to the fake treatment. That makes the effect difficult to measure. A patient might feel better after a placebo simply because an illness was already fading on its own. Symptoms can also naturally rise and fall over time. Without a way to separate the placebo effect from ordinary recovery, doctors cannot tell whether a treatment produced a real medical benefit or whether the patient would have improved anyway.

¶3 Researchers use two methods to separate a real treatment's effect from the placebo effect. The first is the double-blind trial. In this study, one group receives the real drug and another group receives a placebo that looks identical. Neither the patients nor the doctors know who is getting which one. [A] If both groups improve by roughly the same amount, the drug is not actually working better than belief alone. [B] The second method looks inside the brain itself. [C] Brain scans show that placebo pain relief activates the same regions as real painkilling drugs. That relief disappears when patients are given a drug that blocks the brain's natural painkillers. [D] That result shows the placebo effect is a real physical response, not simply patients imagining they feel better.

¶4 This is why modern drug trials almost always compare a new medicine against a placebo before health regulators approve it. Without that comparison, a drug that does nothing more than belief could still appear to work. The same lesson applies outside the hospital. When someone says a remedy cured them, that alone is not proof it worked. Their body might have improved on its own, or their belief alone might have eased the symptom. The placebo effect explains why real evidence requires a comparison, not just one person's experience.

  • morphine: a strong drug used to relieve severe pain
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Questions

11 questions — every TOEFL Reading question type, in test order.

Q1 · Vocabulary
The word genuinely in paragraph 1 ("a person's symptoms genuinely improve") is closest in meaning to
  1. A. partly
  2. B. truly
  3. C. falsely
  4. D. rarely
Answer
Correct: B
Q2 · Reference
The word It in paragraph 1 ("It shows up most often with pain, nausea, tiredness, and other symptoms that the brain has some control over.") refers to
  1. A. a sugar pill
  2. B. the fake treatments
  3. C. a person's belief
  4. D. the placebo effect
Answer
Correct: D
Q3 · Essential Term
Based on the information in the passage, the term placebo effect can best be explained as
  1. A. any medicine that a patient buys without a doctor's prescription
  2. B. the medical proof that a new drug is safe for patients to use
  3. C. a genuine improvement in a person's symptoms after a treatment with no active medicine, caused by the person's belief that it will work
  4. D. a study method in which neither the doctor nor the patient knows who received the real drug
Answer
Correct: C
Q4 · Factual Information
According to paragraph 1, what happened when army doctors ran out of morphine at the field hospital in Anzio?
  1. A. A nurse injected the wounded soldier with ordinary salt water instead, and his pain eased anyway
  2. B. Doctors gave the soldier a stronger drug than morphine to manage his pain
  3. C. The soldier's pain worsened until new supplies of morphine arrived
  4. D. Henry Beecher performed surgery to treat the soldier's wound directly
Answer
Correct: A
Q5 · Negative Fact
According to paragraph 3, all of the following are true EXCEPT
  1. A. In a double-blind trial, neither the patients nor the doctors know who received the real drug
  2. B. Brain scans show that placebo pain relief activates the same brain regions as real painkilling drugs
  3. C. Placebo pain relief disappears once patients are given a drug that blocks the brain's natural painkillers
  4. D. Patients who receive a placebo in a double-blind trial never experience any reduction in pain
Answer
Correct: D
Q6 · Sentence Simplification
Which of the sentences below best expresses the essential information in the highlighted sentence in paragraph 2? Incorrect choices change the meaning in important ways or leave out essential information.

Highlighted: "Without a way to separate the placebo effect from ordinary recovery, doctors cannot tell whether a treatment produced a real medical benefit or whether the patient would have improved anyway."
  1. A. Because there is no way to tell the placebo effect apart from a patient's natural recovery, doctors cannot know whether a treatment truly worked or whether the patient would have gotten better regardless.
  2. B. Because doctors cannot identify a treatment's real medical benefit, they are unable to separate the placebo effect from natural recovery.
  3. C. Doctors have some trouble telling the placebo effect apart from a patient's natural recovery.
  4. D. Since the placebo effect can never be measured in any way, doctors assume that no treatment ever produces a real medical benefit.
Answer
Correct: A
Q7 · Inference
Based on the information in paragraphs 2 and 3, what can be inferred about why researchers compare groups of patients rather than simply asking patients whether a treatment helped?
  1. A. Doctors are not trained well enough to notice a patient's symptoms improving without objective test results
  2. B. Patients might improve because of belief or natural recovery even when a drug itself does nothing, so only a comparison between groups can reveal what actually caused the improvement
  3. C. Patients tend to exaggerate their symptoms unless a study is double-blind
  4. D. Brain scans cost more money than simply asking patients how they feel
Answer
Correct: B
Q8 · Rhetorical Purpose
The author mentions Henry Beecher's experience at the field hospital in Anzio in order to
  1. A. argue that saline injections work as well as morphine for treating pain
  2. B. explain how double-blind trials were first developed by army doctors
  3. C. give a real historical example of how belief alone can ease a patient's symptoms
  4. D. criticize military doctors for allowing morphine supplies to run out
Answer
Correct: C
Q9 · Paragraph Relation
How does paragraph 3 relate to paragraph 2?
  1. A. It repeats the claim that placebo pain relief activates the same brain regions as real drugs
  2. B. It describes two specific methods that address the difficulty of measuring the placebo effect explained in paragraph 2
  3. C. It shows that the two methods described actually make the measurement problem in paragraph 2 worse
  4. D. It connects the historical story in paragraph 1 to the significance discussed in paragraph 4
Answer
Correct: B
Q10 · Insert Text
Look at the four squares [■] in paragraph 3 that indicate where the following sentence could be added.

That blindness on both sides keeps hope or expectation from secretly changing the results.

Where would the sentence best fit?
  1. A. Square A
  2. B. Square B
  3. C. Square C
  4. D. Square D
Answer
Correct: A
Q11 · Prose Summary Select THREE · 2 pts
Directions: An introductory sentence for a brief summary of the passage is provided below. Complete the summary by selecting the THREE answer choices that express the most important ideas in the passage. Some sentences do not belong in the summary because they express ideas that are not presented in the passage or are minor ideas in the passage. This question is worth 2 points.

The placebo effect is a genuine improvement in symptoms that occurs when a person believes a treatment will work, and understanding it has shaped both medical research and how people judge whether a remedy really works.

  1. A. The placebo effect occurs when a person's symptoms genuinely improve after a treatment with no active medicine, simply because the person believes it will work.
  2. B. In the early 1940s, a nurse treated a badly wounded soldier with a saline injection instead of morphine at a field hospital in Anzio.
  3. C. Symptoms can naturally rise and fall over time, which is one reason the placebo effect is hard to measure.
  4. D. Double-blind trials and brain scans are two methods researchers use to show that the placebo effect is a real physical response, not just something patients imagine.
  5. E. Henry Beecher later required every hospital in the United States to adopt double-blind testing.
  6. F. Because belief alone can influence a patient's symptoms, real evidence about whether a treatment works requires comparing it against a placebo rather than relying on one person's experience.
Answer
Correct: A, D, F