C1 Advanced · 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 C1 the words themselves get less frequent and the distinctions get finer — shades of formality, idiomatic phrases where no rule explains the choice, and phrasal verbs whose meaning shifts with the particle. Reading widely does more for this part than any list, because the only way to know that a combination sounds right is to have met it.
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.
