B2 First · Use of English · Grammar
Ten structures, one at a time: what the item is really checking, where the mark goes, and eight transformations with the reason shown the moment you answer.
Every FCE Use of English Part 4 item is built from a small set of structures — the passive, the causative, reported speech, conditionals, wishes, the modal perfect, verb patterns, the present perfect, comparison and the linking words. Six items, twelve marks, and the same ten patterns rotating underneath them session after session. This section takes those ten one at a time.
Each pattern has an explanation written from the examiner's side — what the item is really checking, where the mark is usually lost, and how to work it out in the ninety seconds you actually have — and then eight transformations to do, one at a time, with the reason arriving the moment you answer. It is the opposite of a timed exercise: the point is not to score, it is to see why.
A six-item exercise tells you your score when you finish; by then you have forgotten what you were thinking at item two. A drill that stops after every item and shows the accepted answers beside yours corrects the thinking while it is still there. That is the difference between practising and revising.
Do a pattern until eight out of eight feels ordinary, then move to the next. When all ten are ordinary, go back to the Part 4 exercises — sixty of them, six mixed items each, on the clock — and the pattern recognition will already be done before you read the key word.
It is a subset of it, chosen by yield. A grammar book covers everything; Part 4 tests perhaps a dozen structures repeatedly and the rest almost never. Learning the dozen productively — able to write them under time — moves more marks per hour than anything else in the paper, and it improves Writing accuracy for free, because the same structures are what examiners look for there.
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The Part 4 exercises mix six patterns in one timed set, the way the exam does. These drills isolate one pattern, drop the clock, and explain every item as you go. Use the drills to build a pattern, and the exercises to test whether it survives under exam conditions.
