C1 Advanced · Reading & Use of English · Part 3
Use the word in capitals to form a word that fits the gap.
Eight gaps, each with a root word in capitals beside the line, and you change it to fit. This is the single most improvable part of the whole paper, because the material is finite: a manageable set of prefixes and suffixes, plus the irregular forms that refuse to follow them.
Two traps account for most lost marks. The first is form — the gap wants a noun and you supply the adjective, or it wants a plural and you write the singular. The second is meaning: negatives. A gap frequently needs "unlikely" rather than "likely", and the only clue is the sense of the sentence around it. Read for the logic of the sentence before you touch the word in capitals.
At C1 single-step answers are the exception. Expect two changes at once, internal spelling shifts that the suffix triggers, and compound forms built from a root you have to recognise in an unfamiliar guise. The set is still finite — that is what keeps this part worth drilling — but it reaches further into low-frequency derivatives than B2 does.
Yes, and it often does — a prefix and a suffix at once ("un-" plus "-able"), or a change of word class plus a plural. Assume more than one step is possible rather than reaching for the single most obvious derivative.
Yes, and learning it is genuinely worth the hours — unlike most vocabulary work, it is a closed set. Learn each affix with an example that shows what it does to the word class, and keep a separate short list of the irregular forms that do not follow the rules.
