The whole paper, in the shape and the order of the real one. Do a part, check it, and if it did not go well open the support and do that part again with the help attached — then clear it and do it once more on your own. At this level the second, unaided attempt is the only one that tells you anything.
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 phrasal verb, the collocation.
Foreign visitors to Britain are handed a great deal of advice about the weather and almost none about the sentences. Yet it is the sentences that catch them out. A British speaker’s words frequently bear no 1 ______ to the size of the thing being described, and a listener who takes them at 2 ______ value will misread the room for years.
Consider the surgeon who calls a nine-hour operation “a bit of a long afternoon”. He is not fishing for compliments, and the modesty is not the point either. He is relying on an audience that already knows what nine hours in theatre involves, and that would think rather less of him if he 3 ______ it out. Where that shared knowledge is absent the joke falls 4 ______ , and the speaker is written 5 ______ as cold.
For the British themselves the habit is second 6 ______ , which is precisely why they make such poor guides to it. Ask them and they will tell you they say what they think — and in their own terms they are not wide of the 7 ______ , since the scaling-down is so automatic that it no longer registers as a choice. Arguing about sincerity is therefore rather 8 ______ the point. Nobody is lying. The dial has simply been set low for so long that nobody remembers setting it.
How to read this part. Part 1 at C2 is almost never a meaning test. All four options mean something close to right; only one of them keeps the company the sentence requires. So read the words on either side of the gap first — the particle, the preposition, the noun that follows — and ask which option forms a phrase you have actually met.
Do it in this order.
The wrong options here are built from neighbouring idioms: with regard to next to bear no relation to, on the surface next to at face value, beside the point next to wide of the mark. If an option feels familiar, check that it is familiar in this frame and not in a neighbouring one.
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 — comparatives, linkers, auxiliaries, empty subjects — but the structures they complete are the hard ones: inversion, in which, substitute do, fronted whether.
Nowhere is the British relationship with silence 9 ______ evident than in the pause. In many languages a gap in conversation is a fault to be repaired; here it is a piece of punctuation, and a speaker who fills every one of them is heard as anxious rather 10 ______ friendly.
The pause before an answer does a great deal of work. It signals that the question has been taken seriously, and it buys the room a moment 11 ______ which to change direction if the answer is going to be awkward. 12 ______ is no equivalent in the written language, which is one reason British emails read as brusque to people who get on perfectly well with the British in person.
Actors know all this better than anyone. 13 ______ the exception of comedy, where the timing is calculated to the half-second, the great British stage pause is not a technical effect at all 14 ______ a way of letting the audience arrive at something a beat ahead of the character. 15 ______ the same instinct does any real explanatory work outside the theatre is debatable; but it is hard to watch a British negotiation and not suspect that it 16 ______ .
How to read this part. Part 2 is the one part you can often finish without understanding the topic. Decide what kind of word is missing before you think of any word at all, and let the structure round the gap tell you: a than further along means a comparative; a bare which to means a preposition; a clause with no subject means there or it.
Do it in this order.
The traps in this part are all near-misses of the same class: then for than, it for there, if for whether, is for does. Getting the class right is not enough — you have to get the member right.
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.
For a century and a half the circular Reading Room at the British Museum was the most 17 ______ space in London. A reader needed a letter of recommendation and nothing else, and the 18 ______ register is one of the strangest in the world: Marx and Conan Doyle and Gandhi, all of them working within a few yards of one another beneath the same blue-and-gold dome.
Sydney Smirke arranged the desks as the spokes of a wheel, so that a single librarian at the centre could see every reader at once — an arrangement whose 19 ______ grandeur was, its architect insisted, entirely accidental. Whether he believed that himself is 20 ______ .
The room’s later history was less happy. When the collection outgrew it in 1997 the books went east to St Pancras, and the dome stood 21 ______ for the best part of a decade, filled with temporary exhibitions that sat 22 ______ under a ceiling built for scholarship. Visitors today are shown it briefly and moved on, 23 ______ that they are standing in the room where half of modern political thought was drafted. The loss is felt most keenly by the few who remember working there, and who describe it, without any 24 ______ at all, as the finest room they have ever sat in.
How to read this part. Word formation at C2 is two decisions, not one. 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.
Do it in this order.
Two traps recur. One is the false negative pair — doubtful versus doubtless, unaware versus unawares — where the wrong member is a real word with the opposite meaning or the wrong class. The other is the -ing / -ed drift: imposing no longer means what imposed means.
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 cleft, a subjunctive, a passive report, a fixed phrase — and the words follow. Contractions count as two words.
three to eight words, including STRUCK
three to eight words, including UNTIL
three to eight words, including RECOMMENDED
three to eight words, including SAID
three to eight words, including EXCEPTION
three to eight words, including LITTLE
How to read this part. Every key-word item is a named structure in disguise. Do not translate the first sentence — identify the structure the key word belongs to, write that structure out, and then fill it with the content of the first sentence.
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 tense or aspect wrong — was said for is said, to change for to have changed. Before you move on, check the time reference 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.
For eleven years part of my job was to answer the letters. They arrived at the dictionary in a steady trickle — never a flood, whatever the newspapers implied — and they were, with very few exceptions, about decline. Someone had heard disinterested used to mean bored. Someone had seen literally attached to something that had not literally happened. Someone wished to know what we proposed to do about it.
What we proposed to do about it was record it, which was never the answer anybody wanted. The letters assumed a relationship between the dictionary and the language that has not existed for two hundred years and possibly never did: that we were a licensing authority, that a word entered English by our leave, and that our leave could be withheld. My predecessor kept a stock reply explaining the difference between describing and prescribing. It was a model of clarity and it satisfied nobody, because it answered the question that had been asked rather than the one that had been meant.
The question that had been meant was not lexicographical. It was this: am I still one of the people who knows? A correspondent who has spent forty years distinguishing imply from infer has invested something in that distinction, and to be told that the distinction is eroding is to be told that the investment is being written down. I came to think the stock reply’s real failing was not that it was inaccurate but that it was unkind — it treated a small grief as a technical misunderstanding.
Not that the letters deserved unlimited sympathy. A certain kind of correspondent, having established that standards were falling, would proceed to a second paragraph in which the falling could be located quite precisely: in the young, in television, in the schools, in people who had arrived recently. The complaint about hopefully turned out to be a complaint about somebody. Those letters I answered briefly, in a tone I would now call cool, and I do not regret it.
The odd thing, looking back, is how rarely anybody wrote to celebrate. In eleven years I received perhaps a dozen letters delighting in a new word, and every one of them came from a foreigner. Native speakers wrote about loss; learners wrote about gain. There is a whole theory of language in that asymmetry and I have never seen anyone develop it properly. My own guess is that if you acquired the language by effort you can still see it, and if you acquired it by osmosis you can only see the parts that have moved.
I left the desk in 2019 and the letters, I am told, now arrive by email and are considerably ruder. The arguments are identical. The word under attack changes every few years and the shape of the complaint never does: a usage is noticed, the noticing is mistaken for a first occurrence, and the first occurrence is mistaken for a decline. Almost always the usage turns out to be older than the complainant. Literally as an intensifier is in Dickens. Nobody who writes to a dictionary about literally wants to hear that it is in Dickens, and I stopped saying so, because being right about the date is not the same as being useful about the anxiety.
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. 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 overstatement: the text says people notice different things, the option says they are more optimistic. And the true but displaced: a genuine detail from paragraph two offered as the answer to a question about paragraph four. 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 translation, so topic will not separate them.
Anna Kovač has translated eleven British novels into Slovene, and she keeps a list. On it go the sentences that defeated her — not the ones that were hard, she is careful to say, but the ones that were impossible. The distinction matters to her a good deal more than it does to her publishers.
37 ______________________
What goes on the list is different in kind. Nothing in these sentences is unclear. Every word has an obvious equivalent, the syntax is plain, and a competent first-year student could produce a version that no reader would question. The version would simply not be the sentence.
38 ______________________
Her standard example runs to four words. A character who has just been passed over for promotion is asked how he feels about it, and answers: “Could have been worse.” Rendered literally into Slovene, the line reports a mild contentment. In the novel it reports devastation.
39 ______________________
Translators have a name for the manoeuvre — compensation — and a general licence to perform it. If a joke cannot be carried in the sentence where it occurs, you may plant it two pages later, where the language will take it. Kovač is not against the practice. She is against the confidence with which it is usually described.
40 ______________________
The alternative, which she has tried twice and abandoned twice, is the footnote. A footnote is honest and it is fatal. It tells the reader exactly what the sentence is doing, and in doing so it removes the one condition under which the sentence works: that the reader should arrive at the meaning unassisted, and feel briefly clever for having done so.
41 ______________________
None of this is peculiar to English, and Kovač is impatient with the suggestion that it is. Slovene has its own untranslatable furniture, and she has watched English translators walk straight into it with the same cheerful incomprehension.
42 ______________________
What she has arrived at, after eleven books, is a working rule rather than a theory. Where a sentence depends on shared knowledge, she asks not whether that knowledge exists in Slovene but whether the Slovene reader will supply it at the speed of reading.
43 ______________________
The list, meanwhile, gets no shorter. She adds to it about twice a book and has never crossed anything off. Asked whether she finds that discouraging, she gave the answer of someone who has spent thirty years among the English: “It could be worse.”
How to read this part. Part 6 is a jigsaw, not a comprehension test. Every option is about translation, so the topic tells you nothing. What tells you everything is reference: a the in front of a noun that has not been mentioned, an If the answer is no with no question before it, a What would be missing with no hypothetical to attach to.
Do it in this order.
The extra paragraph is written to be plausible and to link to nothing. It will usually sit on the topic, name someone already mentioned, and introduce no phrase that the 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.
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 on the accents people are told to lose. 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 · Ruth, former television newsreader
I was twenty-three and they were kind about it. Nobody said “lose the Yorkshire”; they said “we’ll do some work on clarity”, and a very patient woman spent six months moving my vowels south without either of us ever naming what was happening. I agreed to all of it. That is the part people find hard to accept when I tell the story now — there was no coercion, only an accurate account of what would happen to my career if I declined. I don’t mourn the accent, exactly. I mourn the fact that I can no longer produce it without sounding like an actor doing it, so that the version of me who existed before twenty-three is now a performance. What I resist is the tidy modern telling in which I was a victim and the BBC was a villain. The BBC was a mirror. It reflected, quite accurately, what the country would tolerate coming out of a screen in 1987, and the country has since changed its mind, which is more than the country usually does.
B · Douglas, barrister
I kept mine, and I want to be honest about why: it worked. A Glasgow accent in an English courtroom buys you about ninety seconds of undivided attention, and ninety seconds is a great deal. Juries assume you are blunt, and once they have assumed it you may be as elaborate as you like. So I have made a living out of the very thing I was told at eighteen would finish my career, and I am aware that this makes me a poor witness for anybody’s argument. What I will say is that the compliment which follows me around — “refreshingly straightforward” — has never once been paid to a colleague from the Home Counties, who is presumed to be straightforward without having to sound it. Being praised for a quality you are assumed to possess by geography is not praise. It is a very polite way of being told where you are from, and after thirty years I find I mind it rather more than I used to.
C · Priya, sociolinguist
The data are less cheerful than the anniversary pieces suggest. Yes, the range of accents on national broadcasting has widened, and it has widened faster than most of us predicted twenty years ago. But widened is not levelled. Move from broadcasting to recruitment and the old hierarchy is close to intact: in matched-guise experiments the same recorded answer, delivered in different accents, still produces significantly different judgements of competence, and the ranking has barely shifted since the 1970s. What has changed is that people now know they are not supposed to say so, which makes the effect harder to measure and no smaller. I would add a caution about the stories we tell here. The accent memoir is redemptive by construction — loss, endurance, recovery — and it selects for people whose careers survived. We never hear from the ones who took the advice, lost the accent and got nowhere anyway.
D · Femi, voice coach
I teach it in both directions, which is the part that surprises people. Half my week goes on giving an actor from Surrey a usable Belfast, and the other half on someone who has been told, by an agent who will deny having said it, that their own voice is “limiting”. I have stopped arguing about whether accents ought to matter and started noticing who is permitted to move between them. An actor who can do six accents is versatile. A witness in a police station who does two is shifty. Same skill, opposite verdict, and the whole of the difference sits with whoever is listening. So when a young performer asks me whether to keep their voice, I no longer answer the question they asked. I ask them who they will be talking to, and how much that person’s opinion of them can be allowed to cost. It is not a satisfying answer and I do not have a better one.
How to read this part. Part 7 is a search, not a reading. You already have the texts; what you do not have is a route into them. So take the question first, decide what shape of sentence would answer it — a concession, a comparison, a quoted phrase — and scan for that shape in all four texts 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: two of the four say something close, and only one says the exact thing asked for. Ruth and Priya both describe national change; Douglas and Femi both quote a coded remark. Decide which half of the question separates them before you answer.
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 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 worth two marks a question and Parts 5–6 two marks each, so the reading parts matter more than their question count suggests.
At C2 a low part is almost never a vocabulary problem. It is a reading-speed problem or a register problem. Note which of the two it was before you book another mock.