Updated 2026-08-23intermediate

TOEFL Reading Practice #017 — The Message That Needed No Messenger

Free TOEFL Reading practice: The Message That Needed No Messenger. 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 Message That Needed No Messenger

¶1 Before the 1840s, a message could travel only as fast as the person or animal carrying it. A letter sent from New York to Chicago took about a week to arrive, and news from Europe took roughly ten days to cross the Atlantic Ocean on the fastest ship available. Samuel Morse, an American painter who later became an inventor, wondered whether a message could travel without anyone carrying it at all. In the 1830s, he began building a telegraph, a device that could send a message down a wire as a series of electrical pulses. With a partner, he also developed a code that turned every letter of the alphabet into a pattern of short and long pulses, later known as Morse code.

¶2 Morse spent years trying to convince the United States government that his invention was useful, and in 1843 Congress finally agreed to pay for a public demonstration. Workers strung a wire on poles between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, a distance of about forty miles. On May 24, 1844, Morse tapped out the first public long-distance message on that line. It reached Baltimore the instant he finished sending the signal. For the first time, a message no longer had to travel at the speed of a horse or a train. It could arrive at the speed of electricity instead, no matter how far the wire stretched.

¶3 News of the demonstration spread quickly, and telegraph companies began building wires across the country, often along routes that railroads had already cleared through forests and mountains. Because an electrical signal weakened as it traveled farther, and because some new lines stretched across more than a thousand miles of open country, messages on the longest routes sometimes arrived too faint to read. Engineers solved this with relay stations, buildings spaced along the route where an incoming signal was captured before it faded and sent back out at full strength. By 1861, a telegraph line connected the East and West coasts of the United States, carrying messages in minutes that the fastest horse-and-rider mail service had needed ten days to deliver.

¶4 One gap still remained. The telegraph could cross a continent, but not an ocean. [A] News between the United States and Europe still traveled only as fast as the fastest ship could carry it. [B] In 1858, a businessman named Cyrus Field tried to close this gap by laying an insulated cable along the floor of the Atlantic Ocean. [C] The cable worked, and for a few days messages crossed the ocean in minutes instead of ten days. [D] Then the signal weakened until it disappeared, and the cable stopped carrying messages altogether. Field tried again, and in 1866 a new cable succeeded and stayed in service for years. For the first time, a message could cross the ocean in minutes instead of days. The telegraph had finally closed the last gap between instant communication and physical distance.

  • Congress: the lawmaking body of the U.S. federal government
  • insulated: covered with a material that keeps electricity from escaping
2

Questions

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

Q1 · Vocabulary
The word roughly in paragraph 1 ("news from Europe took roughly ten days to cross the Atlantic Ocean") is closest in meaning to
  1. A. approximately
  2. B. exactly
  3. C. rarely
  4. D. quickly
Answer
Correct: A
Q2 · Reference
The word It in paragraph 2 ("Morse tapped out the first public long-distance message on that line. It reached Baltimore the instant he finished sending the signal.") refers to
  1. A. that line
  2. B. the first public long-distance message
  3. C. Baltimore
  4. D. the signal
Answer
Correct: B
Q3 · Essential Term
Based on the information in the passage, the term telegraph can best be explained as
  1. A. a person hired to carry letters quickly between cities
  2. B. a device that could send a message down a wire as a series of electrical pulses
  3. C. a code used only by ship captains to signal other ships
  4. D. a type of railroad car used to carry mail across the country
Answer
Correct: B
Q4 · Factual Information
According to paragraph 2, what happened when Morse sent the first public long-distance message between Washington, D.C., and Baltimore?
  1. A. The message reached Baltimore the instant Morse finished sending it
  2. B. The message took several hours to travel the forty miles between the two cities
  3. C. Congress decided not to pay for the wire after seeing the results
  4. D. Workers had to repair the wire several times before the message could be sent
Answer
Correct: A
Q5 · Negative Fact
According to paragraph 3, all of the following are true EXCEPT
  1. A. Many telegraph companies built their wires along routes that railroads had already cleared
  2. B. Relay stations captured a weakening signal and sent it back out at full strength
  3. C. By 1861, a telegraph line connected the East and West coasts of the United States
  4. D. The horse-and-rider mail service could deliver a message faster than the new telegraph line
Answer
Correct: D
Q6 · Sentence Simplification
Which of the sentences below best expresses the essential information in the highlighted sentence in paragraph 3? Incorrect choices change the meaning in important ways or leave out essential information.

Highlighted: "Because an electrical signal weakened as it traveled farther, and because some new lines stretched across more than a thousand miles of open country, messages on the longest routes sometimes arrived too faint to read."
  1. A. Because the signal grew weaker over distance, and because some lines crossed more than a thousand miles of open country, messages on the longest routes sometimes became too faint to read.
  2. B. Messages on the longest routes sometimes became too faint to read because the lines crossed more than a thousand miles of open country.
  3. C. Signals weakened over long distances because messages on the longest routes had already become too faint to read.
  4. D. All telegraph messages became too faint to read once a line stretched more than a thousand miles.
Answer
Correct: A
Q7 · Inference
Based on the information in paragraphs 3 and 4, what can be inferred about communication between the United States and Europe between 1861 and 1866?
  1. A. It became instant, because the transcontinental telegraph line reached the Atlantic coast by 1861
  2. B. It relied on the relay stations described in paragraph 3, which had been extended across the Atlantic Ocean
  3. C. It stopped almost completely, because ships refused to carry mail once telegraph lines existed
  4. D. It still took about as long as it had before the telegraph was invented, since no working cable connected the two continents until 1866
Answer
Correct: D
Q8 · Rhetorical Purpose
The author mentions that a letter from New York to Chicago took about a week to arrive, and that news from Europe took roughly ten days by ship, in order to
  1. A. show that European news was considered more important than domestic news
  2. B. give readers a sense of how slow long-distance communication was before the telegraph existed
  3. C. argue that ships were a more dependable way to send messages than horses
  4. D. explain why Congress eventually agreed to fund Morse's demonstration
Answer
Correct: B
Q9 · Paragraph Relation
How does paragraph 4 relate to paragraph 3?
  1. A. It shows that the relay stations described in paragraph 3 failed to solve the problem of weakening signals
  2. B. It repeats the explanation of why some telegraph lines needed relay stations
  3. C. It shows a further limitation that remained even after the achievement described in paragraph 3, and explains how that limitation was eventually solved
  4. D. It describes a different invention that replaced the telegraph described in paragraph 3
Answer
Correct: C
Q10 · Insert Text
Look at the four squares [■] in paragraph 4 that indicate where the following sentence could be added.

But that success did not last long.

Where would the sentence best fit?
  1. A. Square A
  2. B. Square B
  3. C. Square C
  4. D. Square D
Answer
Correct: C
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.

In the 1840s, Samuel Morse's telegraph made it possible to send a message over long distances almost instantly, and engineers spent the following decades extending that reach across a continent and, eventually, across an entire ocean.

  1. A. Samuel Morse built a device that could send messages down a wire as patterns of electrical pulses, later known as Morse code.
  2. B. News from Europe took about ten days to reach the United States by ship before the telegraph existed.
  3. C. Telegraph companies solved the problem of signals weakening over long distances by building relay stations, which eventually let a single line cross the entire American continent.
  4. D. The first public telegraph line connecting Washington, D.C., and Baltimore was about forty miles long.
  5. E. Cyrus Field eventually succeeded in laying a telegraph cable across the floor of the Atlantic Ocean, connecting the United States and Europe.
  6. F. Cyrus Field's first attempt at a transatlantic cable in 1858 worked perfectly and never failed.
Answer
Correct: A, C, E