The whole paper, in the shape and the order of the real one, with the support already open on every part. Do each part with the help showing, press Check, then clear the support and do the part once more on your own. The texts are not easier than the exam’s; only the help arrives earlier. The unaided second attempt is the one the page reports.
This is the scaffolded mock: every part opens with its support showing. Use it, check, then clear it and try the part alone — that second attempt is the one to watch.
For each question, decide which answer (A, B, C or D) best fits the gap. Every option is a real word and every option makes sense on its own. What decides it is the company the word keeps — the fixed phrase, the collocation, the preposition that follows.
The British compliment repays close study, because a great deal of it is not a compliment at all. Consider the word brave. A colleague who calls your new haircut brave, or your decision to serve fish at Christmas brave, is not praising your courage. They are damning you with 1 ______ praise — informing you, with impeccable manners, that a mistake has been made and that they were not consulted.
Interesting does similar work. So does ambitious, which in a planning meeting means that the thing will never be built. These are not lies; they are 2 ______ compliments, and the British ear is tuned to them from childhood. A speaker who is at 3 ______ to say how much she enjoyed your talk has enjoyed it. A speaker who says it was interesting is asking you, kindly, never to give it again.
To an outsider all of this can look like the 4 ______ of insincerity. It is closer to the opposite. The compliment that is not quite a compliment gives the listener the 5 ______ of the doubt: it leaves them room to hear the praise, if praise is what they need to hear, and to hear the warning later, in private, when it will do less damage. The manoeuvre is not lost 6 ______ the people it is performed on. To all 7 ______ and purposes, both parties know exactly what has been said; what neither of them has done is say it.
The trick is to know the register. From a stranger, not bad is polite. From a Yorkshireman who has known you for thirty years, it is 8 ______ praise — and you may have to wait another thirty for the next.
How to read this part. You are doing Part 1 with the help already showing, so use it for what it is: the struck-out options and the line under each question tell you what kind of phrase the gap is testing, and nothing more. Part 1 at C2 is almost never a meaning test — every option means roughly the right thing. It is a test of which words keep company: the fixed phrase, the collocation, the particle. Read the words on either side of the gap before you read the options.
Do it in this order.
The wrong options here are built from neighbouring words: underhand next to backhanded, favour next to benefit, intentions next to intents. If an option feels familiar, check that it is familiar in this frame and not in a neighbouring one. And when you clear the support, notice which items you can still do without the strike-outs — those are the ones you own.
On each question. The help for the ones you missed is now attached to the question itself — the options that cannot be right are crossed out, and the place to look is marked.
Write one word in each gap. At C2 the answers are still grammar words — linkers, auxiliaries, determiners, particles — but the structures they complete are the hard ones: inversion after a negative, so … as to, fossilised subjunctives, concessive however.
No sooner had the email gone round 9 ______ the translation began. Nobody in the building had been sacked. Three people, it said, would be moving on, a fourth had decided to explore other opportunities, and the department as a whole was to be right-sized — a verb so carefully chosen 10 ______ to mean nothing at all to anyone who had not already heard the news.
11 ______ that anybody was deceived. The purpose of language like this is not to hide what has happened but to make it possible to be in a room with the people it has happened to. 12 ______ it not for the euphemism, the manager would have to say the plain word to somebody’s face, and the plain word — sacked, dismissed, let go, whatever the generation prefers — is one the British will go to remarkable lengths never to pronounce, let 13 ______ hear pronounced about themselves.
The cost is paid later. A phrase that has been used to soften bad news cannot afterwards be used for anything else, which is why the company’s next genuine reorganisation will need a new word, and the one after that another. On 14 ______ account will right-sized survive more than a year or two; it is already, to anyone under thirty, a joke. 15 ______ that as it may, the machine goes on producing them, and the striking thing is how quickly each replacement acquires the taint of the word it replaced. The euphemism does not remove the meaning. It only borrows the meaning for a while — and the loan, 16 ______ generous the terms, always falls due.
How to read this part. The help on this part names the class of each missing word and the shape of the structure round it. That is what you should be doing for yourself in the exam: decide what kind of word is missing before you think of any word at all. A than-shaped sentence needs a comparative; a will before its subject means a negative is in front; a to-infinitive after so means as. Part 2 is the one part you can often finish without understanding the topic.
Do it in this order.
The traps in this part are all near-misses of the same class: when for than, that for as, any for no, whatever for however. Getting the class right is not enough — you have to get the member right. When you clear the support, the class line disappears; that is the moment to check whether you can still name it yourself.
On each question. The help for the ones you missed is now attached to the question itself — the options that cannot be right are crossed out, and the place to look is marked.
Use the word given in capitals at the end of each line to form a word that fits the gap. At C2 the change is rarely a single suffix: expect a prefix as well, a change of word class, or both. Read the whole sentence — the negative is often hidden in the meaning, not in the grammar.
Every reader admitted to the Bodleian Library in Oxford must first make a declaration, and in substance it has gone 17 ______ for four centuries: not to remove any book, not to mark or deface one, and not to bring into the library, or kindle there, any fire or flame. New readers tend to smile at the last clause. The librarians, who have watched the building survive four hundred winters without central heating, read it with a 18 ______ that is not entirely put on.
The library does not lend. It did not lend to Charles I, whose request in 1645 met with a polite 19 ______ , and it does not lend now, which means that a scholar who needs a book must go to the book. To anyone raised on the modern assumption that knowledge should be delivered, this looks like 20 ______ for its own sake. Regular readers come to see it 21 ______ : a book that cannot leave is a book that is always there.
The oath does something else, too, which its authors can hardly have intended. Sworn aloud, in a room built for the purpose, it makes the first visit a ceremony — and a reader who has promised, in so many words, not to set fire to the collection is 22 ______ to treat it casually afterwards. Other libraries have tried to reproduce the effect with signage, and have found it 23 ______ . The words are the same. What is missing is the 24 ______ of having said them.
How to read this part. Word formation at C2 is two decisions, not one, and the help on this part shows you both being made. First: what class does the slot need? — look at the words either side, not at the stem. Second: is it negative? — and that answer comes from the meaning of the paragraph, never from the grammar. Two of the eight here take un-, and the class line will not tell you which; the argument will.
Do it in this order.
Two traps recur. The invented noun — solemnness, obstinateness — where the real noun uses a Latin ending the stem does not show you. And the missing prefix: changed and likely are both grammatical in their slots and both say the opposite of what the paragraph says. When you clear the support, the shape line goes; make sure you can still say, for each gap, why the prefix is or is not there.
On each question. The help for the ones you missed is now attached to the question itself — the options that cannot be right are crossed out, and the place to look is marked.
Complete the second sentence so that it means the same as the first, using the word given. Do not change that word. Write between three and eight words, including the word given. In the real paper each of these is worth two marks — one for each half of the structure — so a half-right answer still scores.
Every item hides one structure. Find the structure first — an inversion, a compact conditional, a subjunctive-style past, a fixed phrase, a verb pattern — and the words follow. Contractions count as two words.
three to eight words, including HARDLY
three to eight words, including BUT
three to eight words, including TIME
three to eight words, including ACCOUNT
three to eight words, including LENGTHS
three to eight words, including DENIED
How to read this part. Every key-word item is a named structure in disguise, and the help on this part names it for you. Do not translate the first sentence — identify the structure the key word belongs to, write that structure out as a skeleton, and then fill it with the content of the first sentence. When you clear the support, the structure line goes: that is when you find out whether you can name it from the key word alone.
Do it in this order.
The two marks are given for two halves. The commonest way to score one instead of two is to get the structure right and the form of the verb wrong — did for had after Hardly, is for was after high time, an infinitive after denied. Before you move on, check the tense and the pattern of every verb you wrote.
On each question. The help for the ones you missed is now attached to the question itself — the options that cannot be right are crossed out, and the place to look is marked.
Read the text and choose the answer (A, B, C or D) which you think fits best. Almost every wrong option here is true of the text somewhere — it is placed under the wrong question, or it says slightly more than the writer said.
I have set cryptic crosswords for a national newspaper for twenty-six years, under a name that is not mine, and in all that time I have met perhaps forty of the people who solve them. It is a strange intimacy. Every morning several hundred thousand strangers sit down with something I made and try, for twenty minutes or an hour, to think exactly as I thought. When they succeed they feel clever. When they fail they feel, in a small way, that I have cheated them. Neither feeling is about me. Both are about the contract.
The contract is the thing outsiders never understand about the cryptic, and the reason they find it so forbidding. A cryptic clue is not a riddle. A riddle may mislead you however it likes; a clue may mislead you only in ways that are, on inspection, perfectly fair. Every word in it must earn its place, either as definition or as instruction, and the solver who has been led up the garden path must be able to walk back down it afterwards and see the exact point at which they took the wrong turning. A clue that cannot be reverse-engineered is not difficult. It is broken, and the letters will say so by lunchtime.
What the setter is actually selling, then, is not difficulty but a particular sensation, which the trade calls the penny drop. It is the half-second in which a sentence that has been read eleven times as English is suddenly read as something else — in which flower stops meaning a plant and starts meaning a river, and the solver sees that it always did. I have come to think this is the whole reason the form exists. The answer is never interesting. The moment of seeing the answer is, and a clue is a machine for manufacturing that moment on demand.
It is often said that the cryptic is peculiarly British, and I used to resist the claim as parochial. I no longer do, though not for the reasons usually given. The usual explanation is that the British love wordplay, which is true and explains nothing, since so do the French. The better explanation, I think, is that the form depends on a reader who is comfortable being deceived by someone they trust — who takes it as a compliment, rather than an insult, to be told a lie that is also, read another way, the truth. That is a national habit before it is a hobby. A culture that says not bad when it means superb has been solving cryptic clues at the breakfast table for a very long time.
My own rule, arrived at slowly, is that the solver must be given everything and told nothing. Every clue I write is read aloud to somebody who does not solve, and if that person laughs at the surface — the innocent sentence the clue pretends to be — I keep it, whether or not the wordplay underneath is elegant. A clue with a dull surface and brilliant mechanics is a clue only other setters admire. The solver will forgive a mechanism that creaks; what they will not forgive is being bored on the way in.
I retire next year, and I have been asked what I will miss. Not the puzzles, I think, which will go on without me and may improve. What I will miss is the post — the letters, now emails, from people I will never meet, who write to say that a clue held them up for forty minutes on a train and that the moment it gave way they laughed out loud and alarmed a stranger. Nobody writes to say a clue was easy. Nobody writes to say a clue was hard. They write about the half-second, and I have spent twenty-six years learning that it is the only thing I was ever paid for.
How to read this part. At C2 the six questions follow the order of the text and each one lives in a single paragraph, except the last, which is about the close. The help on this part tells you which paragraph and what the question is really asking — it does not tell you the answer, because the exam will not either. Answer each one in your own words from the text first, and only then look at A–D. If you read the options before you have your own answer, the well-written wrong one will look like yours.
Do it in this order.
Two wrong-option shapes dominate this part. The true but displaced: the puzzles really will go on without him, and it is offered as the answer to a question about what he will miss. And the literal reading of a figure: “solving cryptic clues at the breakfast table” offered as a fact about origins. Test every option against this question, not against the text in general.
On each question. The help for the ones you missed is now attached to the question itself — the options that cannot be right are crossed out, and the place to look is marked.
Seven paragraphs have been removed from the article. Choose from paragraphs A–H the one which fits each gap. There is one extra paragraph you will not need. Match the links, not the topic: every paragraph in this part is about misquotation, so topic will not separate them.
Miriam Pell keeps a card index in a spare bedroom in Reading, and it contains nothing that anybody said. Four thousand cards, each carrying a famous line, the name it is attached to, and — in red — the words that were actually spoken or written, if any were. She has been adding to it for thirty-one years, first as a reference librarian and now, in retirement, as something closer to a collector.
37 ______________________
The improvement is nearly always of the same kind. The real sentence is a little too long, or a little too flat, or has its stress in the wrong place, and the version that survives has been quietly repaired.
38 ______________________
What interests her is not the error but its direction. A misremembered line could in principle drift anywhere; in practice it drifts towards the memorable, as though the language itself had a preference and were enforcing it one mouth at a time.
39 ______________________
None of this would matter much if the improved versions stayed in cinemas and anthologies. They do not. They turn up in wedding speeches and leading articles, in the mouths of ministers and on the walls of gyms, and Pell has spent a good part of her retirement being asked, by people who are about to use one, whether it is genuine.
40 ______________________
She has some sympathy with them. The version they want to use is, by any test except the historical one, the better sentence, and she is not sure that history is entitled to the last word.
41 ______________________
Which raises the question of what, exactly, she thinks she is correcting. If the line is better, and the language wants it, and nobody is deceived about anything that matters, the red ink can look like pedantry.
42 ______________________
Her one concession to the modern world is a website, maintained by a nephew, on which about a tenth of the index can be searched. It receives, she says, two kinds of visitor: people checking a line before they use it, and people who have just used one and would rather not be told.
43 ______________________
She showed me the card as I was leaving. It is filed under her own name, and it is the only one in the index written entirely in red.
How to read this part. Part 6 is a jigsaw, not a comprehension test, and the help on this part shows you the join to look at — never the piece that fits it. Every option is about misquotation, so the topic tells you nothing. What tells you everything is reference: a the in front of a noun that has not been mentioned, a them with nobody yet to be, a Which that needs a whole paragraph to point at.
Do it in this order.
The extra paragraph is written to be plausible and to link to nothing. It sits on the topic, names the index, and introduces no phrase that any following paragraph picks up. If a paragraph fits the subject but nothing after it points back at it, that is the one you leave out. When you clear the support, do this part slowly: it is the part where the help was doing the most.
On each question. The help for the ones you missed is now attached to the question itself — the options that cannot be right are crossed out, and the place to look is marked.
You are going to read four contributions to a series about writing that is meant to be heard rather than read. For questions 44–53, choose from the writers A–D. The writers may be chosen more than once. Work from the questions to the texts, not the other way round.
A · Gareth, political speechwriter
I write for a mouth I do not own, which is the first thing to understand about the trade and the last thing anyone outside it believes. The minister’s voice is in my head all day — its lengths, the consonants it swallows, the words it cannot say without sounding like someone else — and a sentence that reads beautifully and cannot be said in that voice is a sentence I have wasted. Rhythm is the whole job. People imagine I spend my time on arguments; I spend it on breath. A line the audience will remember has to arrive at the end of a breath, not in the middle, so that the pause after it is physiological rather than theatrical. The rule of three is not a rhetorical trick, whatever the textbooks say. It is the smallest number that makes a pattern, and the audience hears the pattern before they hear the words, which is why the third item can be almost anything. I have watched a hall applaud a list whose third item they had not understood. They were applauding the shape. What I have never managed, in nineteen years, is to write the line that gets quoted next morning. Those are always the speaker’s own — an ad lib, a slip, a joke at my draft’s expense. I have made my peace with it. The quoted line is the one the room already believed.
B · Leah, performance poet
The page is where my poems go to be filed; they live in the room. I know how that sounds, and I have stopped apologising for it. A poem that works out loud and fails on paper has failed at nothing I care about, and the reverse — the poem that is exquisite on the page and dies in the mouth — is the commonest thing in the country, because most poets write for the eye and read aloud as an afterthought. I write the other way round. Every line is tested against an actual breath, and if I cannot get to the end of it without gasping, the line is wrong, not my lungs. What surprises people is how much of the work is silence. A pause on the page is a line break — the reader supplies it, at whatever length they choose. A pause in the room is mine: I decide how long a hundred people wait, and I have learned that they will wait far longer than I expected, provided they can see that I am not waiting too. I am often asked whether this is really poetry or a kind of theatre. I find the question dull. The oldest poems we have were made for the ear and remembered by it, and writing them down was the innovation, not saying them.
C · Orla, advertising copywriter
Six words. Occasionally seven, and I fight for every one of them. A slogan is the most compressed form of writing there is — more than a haiku, because a haiku does not have to sell anything — and what people never see is the two hundred lines that were thrown away to get to it. The test is not whether it reads well. Nothing I write is read; it is heard, half-attended to, on a bus, over a conversation. So it has to survive being misheard. A slogan that depends on a pun works only for the people who catch the pun, and half of them will resent being made to. What I want is a line that sounds inevitable, so that the listener has the sensation of having thought of it themselves. Rhythm does most of that: a stressed syllable at the end, a pattern that closes. The cleverest line I ever wrote was cut in favour of a duller one that scanned, and the duller one was right. I mind the moral side of it more than I used to. A phrase engineered to bypass thought is a phrase engineered to bypass thought, and it does not become innocent because the product is toothpaste. I am good at it. I am not sure that is entirely a compliment.
D · Simon, parish priest
Most of what I say in a week was written four hundred years ago by somebody with a better ear than mine, and I have come to see that as the point rather than the problem. A congregation does not want my sentences. It wants sentences it has said before, at a funeral or a wedding or the last time it was frightened, and the rhythm of those sentences is what carries people who have stopped believing the words. I have buried atheists who asked for the old service, and I understood them completely. My own writing is the sermon, and the sermon is where I learned humility. The first ones I wrote were essays, and they were read to a church that could not turn back a page. Now I write for the ear: short sentences, one idea, and the important thing said twice in two different ways, because a listener who missed it the first time cannot ask. The temptation of the trade is to become the voice — the cadence people come for, the pauses that sound like depth. I have heard preachers who could make a bus timetable sound like scripture, and I distrust it in them and in myself. The old words survive because nobody owns them. Mine will not, and I would rather they were plain.
How to read this part. Part 7 is a search, not a reading, and the help on this part tells you what shape of sentence to search for — a condition, an anecdote, a comparison — and strikes out the writers who plainly could not have said it. It does not name the writer. Take the question first, decide what kind of sentence would answer it, and scan all four texts for that shape before you read anything closely.
Do it in this order.
Because writers may be chosen more than once, the trap here is the near-neighbour opinion: Gareth and Leah both talk about pauses; Orla and Simon both distrust something in themselves; Gareth and Simon both say their words will not last. Decide which half of the question separates the pair before you answer — and when you clear the support, find the pair yourself before you choose.
On each question. The help for the ones you missed is now attached to the question itself — the options that cannot be right are crossed out, and the place to look is marked.
The marks below are your best unaided attempt on each part — the one you did after clearing the support, not the one you did with it open. Parts 1–3 are one mark a question; in the real paper Part 4 is two marks a question and Parts 5–6 two marks each.
This was the scaffolded mock, so a high score with the help open tells you little. Look at the gap between the two attempts on each part: where it is wide, the help was doing the work, and that is the part to revisit before Mock 2.