Two tasks in ninety minutes: about forty-five minutes each, including planning and reading it back. Write the answer, press Check to see the model and the criteria, and if the task did not go well open the support and write it a second time with the plan in front of you. Keep the first version. Comparing the two is where the marks are.
You must answer this question. Read the two texts and write an essay of 240–280 words. Summarise and evaluate the key points from both texts, in your own words as far as possible. Write in an academic register, for a tutor. There are two jobs in that instruction and most candidates do only one.
Text 1 — from a campaign pamphlet
A tax form that a claimant cannot complete is not a difficult form; it is a closed door. Every year millions of pounds of support go unclaimed in Britain, and the commonest reason given by those who did not claim is not that they thought themselves ineligible but that they could not understand what was being asked. Language of this kind is rarely accidental. Complexity protects the organisation that writes it and costs only the reader, which is why no institution has ever simplified its prose voluntarily. Plain English in public documents should therefore be a legal requirement, tested on real readers before publication and enforced like any other standard.
Text 2 — from a lecture on legal drafting
Nobody defends obscurity, and the campaign against it has done a great deal of good. But there is a second danger that the plain-language movement rarely names. A rule shortened until anybody can read it is frequently no longer the rule: the exceptions have gone, the conditions have gone, and the reader now understands, with perfect confidence, something that is not true. Confident misunderstanding is more expensive than admitted bafflement, because the baffled reader asks for help. Nor is clarity a quality a document can possess on its own. It is a relation between a document and a specific reader with a specific task, and the only honest test of a text is whether the person who must act on it can do so.
Your answer 0 words
Mark your own against the real criteria:
Both writers treat the clarity of official English as a public question rather than a stylistic one, but they locate the problem in different places.
The first argues that impenetrable official prose operates as a barrier: a form nobody can complete is, in practice, an entitlement nobody receives. Because organisations have no incentive to simplify what protects them, plainness must be imposed from outside rather than left to goodwill. The second accepts that obscurity harms readers, but warns that enforced simplification carries a cost of its own, since a regulation compressed into a sentence anyone can read may no longer be the regulation; and it adds that clarity is not a property of a text at all but a relation between a text and the reader who must act on it.
Both cases seem to me sound as far as they go, and they are less opposed than their tone suggests. The first describes an exclusion; the second describes a trap awaiting those who set out to cure it. Nothing in the second denies that the exclusion is real.
The second is the more useful in refusing the assumption that shorter necessarily means clearer. False clarity is more dangerous than acknowledged difficulty, because a reader who understands nothing goes and asks, whereas a reader who misunderstands confidently does not. That objection cannot, however, be allowed to become an excuse — which is precisely the use an institution would make of it.
The workable position is the second writer's test applied with the first writer's insistence: identify who must act on the document, write for that person, and have the result audited outside the body that wrote it.
The plan.
Every content point must appear.
An opening you can borrow. “Both writers treat the clarity of official English as a public question rather than a stylistic one, but they locate the problem in different places.” — one sentence that frames both texts and names the difference between them. Borrow the shape, not the words: Both writers treat X as …, but they locate the problem in different places.
Write an answer to one of the questions below in 280–320 words. Put the number of the question you have chosen at the top of your answer. The genre is not decoration: each of these three is marked on whether it reads like the real thing.
2 (a) · The article. An international magazine is running a series called What visitors always get wrong. Write an article about one thing outsiders reliably misread about your own country — a habit, a phrase, a piece of behaviour. Explain what it looks like from outside, what it actually is, and why the misreading is so persistent. Readership: educated, international, not expert. An article may be personal and may use humour; it must not be a list.
2 (b) · The review. A cultural website invites reviews under the heading Would not travel: a book, film or exhibition that you admire but that you believe a visitor from another culture would seriously misunderstand. Describe it, give your assessment of it, and explain precisely what a newcomer is likely to miss. A review must both describe and judge, and must end with a clear recommendation.
2 (c) · The report. You teach at a language school whose advanced students speak excellent English and are still misread socially in Britain. Write a report for the director recommending how the spoken-register work in the school could be improved. Cover the current problem, two or three specific proposals and their likely cost or difficulty. Use headings. A report is impersonal, and every recommendation must be actionable.
Your answer 0 words
Mark your own against the real criteria:
A model answer to Question 2(b), the review. 308 words.
There is a small exhibition on the first floor of the Museum of London that visitors walk past on their way to the plague. They should stop. Excuse Me occupies three rooms and sets out to document a subject nobody has previously thought worth a vitrine: the ordinary British apology.
The first room is the strongest. It is simply a wall of recordings — a hundred and forty people saying sorry, in shops, on trains, at funerals, at each other's feet on a pavement — and a transcript running underneath. Within five minutes you begin to hear what the curators want you to hear, which is that almost none of these apologies is an admission of anything. They are traffic signals. They mean I am about to pass you, or you have hurt me and I am giving you a route out, or, most commonly, I acknowledge that we are both here.
The second room, on the history, is thinner, and the third, which asks whether the habit is declining, resolves into a set of questions on a wall. But the first room has already done the work.
What a visitor from outside Britain is likely to miss is the sheer absence of contrition. If you come from a culture where an apology concedes fault, the wall of recordings sounds like a nation of people admitting to things at a rate that cannot possibly be sincere — and the obvious conclusion, that the British apologise insincerely, is exactly wrong. The word is not carrying guilt at all. It is carrying the acknowledgement of another person, and English happens to have assigned that job to a word that looks like guilt.
Go, and stand in the first room until the recordings loop. Admission is free, which in the circumstances feels like an apology of its own.
The plan.
Every content point must appear.
An opening you can borrow. For the review: “There is a small exhibition on the first floor of the Museum of London that visitors walk past on their way to the plague. They should stop.” — the thing, the place, and the verdict, in two sentences. For the report: “This report sets out the reasons why advanced learners at the school continue to be misread in social English, and recommends three changes to the spoken-register programme.” For the article: open on one concrete scene, not on a generalisation about your country.
Writing marks itself here against the four real Cambridge scales. A task counts as done when the length is right and every criterion is honestly ticked.
The single most common way to lose a band on C2 Part 1 is to write an excellent summary and forget to evaluate — or to argue passionately and never summarise. If you ticked every box except the evaluation one, that is the whole diagnosis, and it is a twenty-minute fix, not a term of study.