The whole paper under exam conditions: no checking, no help, and a clock that starts when you answer your first question. Work through all seven parts, then hand in. Every part is marked at once, and only then does the support open — so that the debrief, and the redo loop that follows it, are about the paper you actually sat.
This is the exam-conditions mock: nothing is checked until you hand in. The clock starts when you answer your first question. After you hand in, every part is marked at once and the support opens for the debrief.
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.
Irony travels badly. In the room it is carried by the voice — a flattening of the tone, a half-beat’s delay, an eyebrow — and none of these survives the journey onto a screen. A remark that would have raised a laugh across a table can, in an email, 1 ______ enormous offence, and the sender, who meant it kindly, is left to 2 ______ over what went wrong.
What went wrong is that the reader was not 3 ______ on the joke. Spoken irony recruits its audience: the speaker checks, in the half-second before the line, that the listener is with them, and if not, 4 ______ the line unsaid. Writing cannot check. It goes out to whoever opens it, in whatever mood they are in, and has to 5 ______ its chances.
The British, who use irony more than most, have therefore developed an elaborate set of written signals to 6 ______ for the loss of the voice. The exclamation mark that means this is a joke; the obviously that means not obviously at all; the full stop, in a text message, that means the sender is 7 ______ from pleased. None of these is reliable, and the most reliable of them, the smiling face, is regarded by the generation that uses irony most as an admission of defeat. Better, they feel, to be misunderstood than to 8 ______ to explaining.
How to read this part. If this part went badly, here is what usually happened: you chose by meaning. At C2 all four options mean roughly the right thing — wonder for puzzle, substitute for compensate — and the item is decided by the word on the other side of the gap: over, on, unsaid, for the loss of. Look at your wrong answers now and check whether each one was the option with the right meaning and the wrong partner.
Do it in this order.
The trap on this text was the neighbouring verb: the sentence before gap 1 had just raised a laugh, and raise was sitting in the options. A word that has been used a line earlier is not a clue; at C2 it is very often bait.
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 — relative pronouns, negatives, fronted what, prepositions before which — but the structures they complete are the hard ones.
There is one occasion 9 ______ which the British permit themselves to say what they feel, and it lasts about four minutes. The wedding toast is the only speech most people will ever give, and it is, by common consent, the only one in which the speaker is required to be sincere — 10 ______ is why so many of them are terrible.
11 ______ else in the culture prepares you for it. A man who has spent forty years describing his closest friend as not bad, for a Welshman is suddenly asked to say, in front of a hundred people, that he loves him, and to say it in words he has not borrowed. Most take refuge in jokes, and the jokes are usually about how 12 ______ they would rather be somewhere else. It is a strange sort of speech 13 ______ spends half its length apologising for itself.
And yet the form survives, and the best of them are remembered for decades — 14 ______ because they were witty but because, for thirty seconds somewhere near the end, the speaker stopped performing. Everyone in the room knows the moment. The voice changes. The notes go down. 15 ______ follows is rarely eloquent — a sentence, sometimes only a name — and it is the part nobody forgets. Had the speaker attempted it at the start, it would have been unbearable. 16 ______ four minutes of jokes, it is the only thing that could possibly have come next.
How to read this part. If this part went badly, the usual reason is not that you did not know the words. It is that you decided the word before you had decided the class — and at C2 the class is where the exam hides the item. Gap 10 needs a relative that can point at a whole clause; gap 15 needs a word that can be a subject by itself; gap 14 needs the first half of a pair whose second half is four words further on. Check your misses against that: was it the wrong word, or the wrong kind of word?
Do it in this order.
Three of the eight gaps accept two answers, and that is normal at C2 — on/at, that/which, After/Following. What is not accepted is a word from the right class with the wrong meaning: Despite for After in gap 16 is a preposition, and it turns the argument of the paragraph inside 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.
Use the word given in capitals at the end of each line to form a word that fits the gap. Expect a prefix as well as a suffix, a change of word class, or both.
The porters’ lodge at the gate of a Cambridge college is the smallest office in the university and, by a comfortable margin, the most 17 ______ . Its occupants hold keys, take deliveries and know everything, and a student who has made an enemy of the lodge will find, with a 18 ______ that cannot be coincidence, that their post is late and their guests are turned away.
Visitors mistake the porters for doormen, which is 19 ______ but unwise. The bowler hat that some colleges still require is not a costume; it is a signal, and what it signals is that the man beneath it has 20 ______ powers that no printed rule describes. A porter can decide that a party is winding down at two in the morning and that a Fellow’s car is just leaving, and the college will back him in both.
What the newcomer finds hardest to read is the register. A porter is 21 ______ polite, and the politeness is where the authority lives. I wonder if you could see your way to… is not a request. It is an instruction, delivered in a form that makes 22 ______ look like a favour and 23 ______ look like bad manners. Students learn this within a term. Their parents, arriving for graduation, 24 ______ struggle with it for the length of a single conversation at the gate.
How to read this part. If this part went badly, look at what kind of wrong answer you gave. Right word, wrong spelling (influencial, resistence) is one problem and it is fixed by a list. Right stem, wrong class (regularly for regularity, unfailing for unfailingly) is a different problem, and it is fixed by reading the slot before you read the stem. And the prefix decision — understandable, not ununderstandable; visibly, not invisibly — is fixed by reading the sentence for sense. Three problems, three cures; work out which one you have.
Do it in this order.
Two gaps on this text were a pair — compliance … resistance — and a pair is a gift: if one half is a noun, so is the other, and they will very often share an ending. Look for pairs in the exam; the sentence structure tells you the class of the second gap before you have read its stem.
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. Each of these is worth two marks in the real paper.
Every item hides one structure. Find the structure first — a wish about the past, a fixed noun phrase, a fronted negative, a passive of surprise — and the words follow. Contractions count as two words.
three to eight words, including WISH
three to eight words, including OBJECTION
three to eight words, including BOUND
three to eight words, including WHATEVER
three to eight words, including SURPRISE
three to eight words, including MEANS
How to read this part. If this part went badly, the diagnosis is almost always one of two. Either you translated the first sentence instead of identifying the structure the key word belongs to — and produced good English that does not use the pattern — or you found the structure and lost the second mark on a detail: the tense after wish, the -ing after objection to, the inversion after By no means. Look at each miss and decide which.
Do it in this order.
Two items here were decided by a passive — to be misunderstood, was taken by surprise — and passives are where the second mark usually goes. Before you move on from any key-word item, ask who is doing the action and whether your verb says so.
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.
For most of my working life I explained the public finances to people who did not want them explained, and I did it, for years, with a metaphor I now think was the most expensive sentence I ever spoke. The country, I would say, is like a household. It has an income and it has outgoings, and if the outgoings exceed the income for long enough, the bailiffs come. Audiences nodded. Ministers nodded. It was clear, it was memorable, and it was — as I eventually had to admit to a room of sixth-formers who had worked it out before I did — not true in any of the ways that mattered.
A household cannot print its own money, set its own interest rate, or borrow for a century from people who are, in the last resort, its own children. A household does not become richer by spending, whereas a country, under certain conditions, does. Every one of these differences was known to me when I used the metaphor, and I used it anyway, because the alternative was forty minutes of explanation and the metaphor took eight seconds. I told myself I was simplifying. I was not. I was substituting a different object and hoping nobody would check.
What I underestimated was how much the metaphor would do once it was loose. A comparison offered as an aid to understanding does not stay an aid; it becomes the understanding. Within a few years the household had stopped being an illustration of the argument and become the argument itself, and any policy that a prudent family would not adopt — borrowing in a downturn, for instance — could be dismissed without discussion. I had not merely explained the public finances. I had furnished them, and the furniture turned out to be load-bearing.
I am not the first to notice that a metaphor is a frame, and that a frame decides what can be seen. What I want to add, from the inside, is that the framer is rarely aware of the choice. I did not select the household over, say, the farm — which has good years and bad and borrows to plant — or the river, or the body. I reached for what was nearest, and what was nearest had been put there by the last person to do my job. Metaphors of this kind are not chosen. They are inherited, and the inheritance is invisible precisely because it is shared.
The obvious remedy is to replace the bad metaphor with a good one, and I spent an unhappy year trying. Nothing took. The farm was accurate and nobody remembered it; the body was vivid and led straight to a different set of errors. I concluded, reluctantly, that a metaphor cannot be replaced by an argument, only by another metaphor, and that the ones which win are not the ones that are true but the ones that are already in the room.
So I now do something I would once have thought cowardly. I use the household — it is the only comparison the audience arrives with — and then I spend the rest of the hour breaking it. The country is like a household, I say, in the following three ways and in no others; and I list the differences, one by one, until the metaphor is standing in the middle of the room with most of its walls gone. It is not elegant. It gets no nods. But it is the only method I have found that leaves people knowing less than they thought they knew when they came in, which, in this subject, is the beginning of knowing anything at all.
How to read this part. If this part went badly, here is what usually happened: you read the options before you had your own answer, and the well-written wrong one — the one that is true of the text somewhere — looked like yours. Question 35 is the clearest case: the paragraph really does say the farm was accurate and the body was vivid, and option B is built from exactly those words. It is the evidence, not the conclusion. Look at each miss and ask whether the option you chose was true, and whether it was the answer to this question.
Do it in this order.
The distinctive trap in this text was evidence offered as conclusion. Twice the writer gives facts and then says what he concluded from them, and twice an option is made from the facts. When a paragraph contains “I concluded” or “What I want to add”, the answer is after those words, not before them.
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.
Every word spoken in the House of Commons is published the next morning, and almost none of it is published as it was said. That is not a scandal. It is the job, and for thirty-one years it was Colin Marsh’s.
37 ______________________
The formula sounds simple until you try to apply it to a human being talking. Marsh’s reporters sat in the gallery in turns of ten minutes, and each came down with a page of what the House had actually sounded like: sentences abandoned halfway, the same point made three times in slightly different words, a minister calling an opponent by the wrong name.
38 ______________________
Where the line falls is the whole craft, and it is not written down anywhere Marsh could show me. He described it instead by cases.
39 ______________________
Members, naturally, have views on this. Every one of them may see the report of their own speech before it is printed, and may suggest corrections; what they may not do is improve it.
40 ______________________
It would be easy to make the office sound heroic, and Marsh was at pains not to. Most of the work, he said, was punctuation.
41 ______________________
That is the part outsiders find hardest to accept: that the record of what was said is, unavoidably, a record of what somebody thought was meant.
42 ______________________
He retired in the spring. Asked whether the members would miss him, he said they would not know he had gone, and that this was the highest compliment the job could pay.
43 ______________________
Which is, when you think about it, the only way a reporter of debates could ever be quoted.
How to read this part. If this part went badly, the likeliest cause is that you placed paragraphs by topic. Every option is about the record, and three of them (C, E, G) are about what stays and what goes, so topic cannot separate them. What separates them is reference: “The formula” after gap 37, “the line” after gap 38, “by cases” before gap 39, “His defence” at the start of H. Go through your misses and find, for each, the one phrase on either side of the gap that only one paragraph can answer.
Do it in this order.
The extra paragraph here was the history — on topic, well written, and answering nothing. It is the standard design: the extra paragraph will usually sit comfortably in the subject and refer to nothing the neighbouring paragraphs set up. When a paragraph fits everywhere in general and nowhere in particular, 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 pun. For questions 44–53, choose from the writers A–D. The writers may be chosen more than once.
A · Neil, newspaper sub-editor
A pun in a headline is a promise that the story underneath will not require your full attention, and readers understand the promise perfectly. Nobody puts a pun over a train crash. The skill — and it is a skill, whatever the people who groan at it think — lies in judging exactly how much of the story the joke is allowed to give away. Too little and it is a riddle; too much and there is no reason to read on. I have written perhaps twenty thousand of them, and I can still be stopped in a corridor by a colleague who thinks one of mine went over the line, and I can still be persuaded. What I will not accept is the suggestion that the pun is a lazy form. A lazy headline says what the story says. A pun has to say it twice, in the same five words, and make the second meaning arrive a half-second after the first, which is the part that takes the whole afternoon. The best one I ever wrote I cannot repeat, because the story it sat on was about somebody’s misfortune and it was, I now think, unkind. It was also, by every professional measure, perfect. I have not resolved that and I do not expect to.
B · Hannah, salon owner
The name came before the shop. I had been a hairdresser for nine years and the joke had been sitting in my head for most of them, and when the lease came up I found I could not open a salon called anything else. My accountant begged. My mother still will not say it aloud. And the strange thing is that it worked in a way nobody predicted, which is that people forgive a place with a bad pun over the door things they would not forgive a place called something tasteful. They arrive already smiling. They have already decided we are not going to take ourselves seriously, which, in a trade built on making people feel they are being judged, turns out to be the whole battle. I get photographed from the pavement about twice a week by strangers, and I have made my peace with the fact that most of them will never come in. What I did not expect was the company. There is a network of us — the fish shop, the bakery, the plumber — and we know one another by our names before our faces. It is the only guild I have ever belonged to, and the entry fee is a groan.
C · Beatrice, primary-school teacher
I run a joke club on Wednesdays, and I started it because the children were already doing it and doing it badly. A seven-year-old who has just discovered that a word can mean two things is the most dangerous creature in the building. They will pun on anything, relentlessly, for weeks, and what they cannot yet do is tell which ones work. That is what the club is for. We sit in a circle and each child tells one, and the rule is that the others have to explain why it is funny before anyone is allowed to laugh. It sounds joyless and it is the opposite. Once a child can say “it works because bark is a dog and a tree”, they have understood something about language that some adults never do — that the ambiguity is not a fault in the system but the system itself. I have colleagues who think I am teaching them to be irritating. I think I am teaching them to read. A child who can find the second meaning in a joke can find it in a poem, and, later, in a politician, which is where the skill actually earns its keep.
D · Tomasz, linguist
The groan is the interesting part, and almost nobody studies it. A joke that fails gets silence; a pun that succeeds gets a noise of protest, and the protest is a form of applause that pretends not to be. I spent three years recording them in pubs, offices and one primary school, and the pattern held everywhere: the better the pun, the louder the groan, and the groan arrives measurably faster than laughter would have. My explanation, for what it is worth, is that a pun catches the listener in the act of understanding. You have processed the sentence one way, and then, without consent, you have processed it the other, and the groan is the sound of a mind objecting to having been used. That is why the British, who dislike being caught doing anything, have made the pun a national art and pretend to despise it. The one thing my data could not tell me is whether the groaners enjoy it, and I have stopped asking, because the answer is always no, and it is always delivered with a smile.
How to read this part. If this part went badly, it was almost certainly the clock and the near-neighbour. Part 7 comes last, it has the most questions, and two of the four writers say something close on nearly every question: Neil and Hannah both say a pun promises less; Beatrice and Tomasz both explain puns; three of the four mention somebody who objected. The exam is asking which half of the question separates the pair. Look at your misses and, for each, find the writer you confused with the right one — and the word in the question that should have separated them.
Do it in this order.
The question words that separate near-neighbours here are small: unresolved (44 is about the reaction; 45 about a conflict still open), to their advantage, while showing that they do, closest to them. At C2 the difference between two candidates is very often one adverb in the question. Read the question twice; read the texts once.
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 — after hand-in, that is the paper itself; if you then redo a part with the support and clear it, the clean attempt replaces it. 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.
Look at the time you took before you look at the marks. At C2 the paper is lost far more often to the clock than to the vocabulary: if you were still in Part 5 at the hour, that is the whole diagnosis, and it is fixed by doing Parts 1–4 faster, not by reading Part 7 more carefully.