Exam Tips - Part 1

With the success of Andy’s series of blogs about free apps, we on the blog team decided that we’d run another series and try to help students who are studying for exams. IELTS runs throughout the year and the Cambridge exams usually run three to four times a year. At the moment I’m teaching CAE (Cambridge Certificate of Advanced English). The CAE exam consists of 5 papers, reading, writing, use of English, listening and speaking.

The paper that I’m going to focus on today is Use of English.  This paper is divided into 5 parts.  For part 3 of this paper Cambridge tests word formation.  Why don’t you try this exercise and see how you get on. 

You need to use the word at the end of each line to form a word that fits in the space in the same line.  There is an example at the beginning (0).  Write your words in the spaces provided.

(0) Relatively

My class is (0) _______­­_ small, there are only 6 students; 3 men and 3 women RELATIVE
with a good mix of different (1) __________.  Some of them have been    NATION
learning English since their (2) _________, others have only taken it up in  CHILD
recent years.  However, they all understand the importance of (3) _________ GRAMMAR
accuracy and we’ve spent a lot of time learning various word (4) _________ and  BEGIN
(5)_________ , known as prefixes and suffixes.  The best way to tackle this task  END
is to read the whole text and then figure out what type of word is (6) ________    SUIT
This could be a verb, noun, adjective or adverb.  Once your (7) ____________ DECIDE
is made then you need is see if it is (8) _________ to make the word negative  NEED
by adding a (9) ___________ prefix or make it plural by adding an ‘s’ to the word.  SUIT
(10)___________, my students found this difficult at first but now after learning  FORTUNE
the various affixes that are needed to change words they are hoping to get at
least 8 out of 10 in this part of the paper. 

I’ll give you the answers and explanations to this task next week.  If you wish to read my previous blog on word formation then click here.  If you’d like to read previous exam tips on our blog then click here and here.

By Heather

By Heather