B2 First · Reading & Use of English · Part 1
Choose the best word (A–D) for each gap in a short text — vocabulary in focus.
Eight gaps in a short text, four options each, and in almost every case all four options mean roughly the same thing. That is the point: this part tests collocation and the company a word keeps, not whether you know the definition. "Make a decision" and "do a decision" are equally comprehensible; only one is English.
Which means the wrong way to practise it is to look up the three options you rejected. The right way is to notice *what the correct word was attached to* — the preposition after it, the noun in front of it, the fixed phrase it belongs to — and record the pair rather than the word. Vocabulary lists do very little for this part; phrase lists do a lot.
At B2 the vocabulary tested is high-frequency: words you have met, in combinations you may not have noticed. The commonest trap is a verb that takes a different preposition from its nearest synonym, or a near-pair like "hard" and "hardly" where only one belongs in the phrase.
Read the whole sentence, not the gap. The clue is usually a word either side of the space — a preposition, a fixed expression, a phrasal verb — rather than the general sense of the text. If all four options fit the meaning, you are looking at a collocation question and the sense will not decide it for you.
Always. There is no penalty for a wrong answer, so an unanswered gap is simply a mark given away. Eliminate the options that break the grammar of the sentence first — that often leaves two rather than four.
