Unfinished Business

C2 Proficiency · Open Cloze · Cambridge Ready original exercise

For questions 1–8, read the text below and think of the word which best fits each gap. Use only one word in each gap. There is an example at the beginning.

(0) ___ should become of a writer's unfinished manuscripts after their death? It is a question to (1) ___ there is no easy answer. On the (2) ___ hand, an author surely has the right to decide what is made public. A draft that its creator considered unfit (3) ___ publication may be clumsy or embarrassing, and to print it regardless amounts (4) ___ a betrayal of trust. On the other hand, (5) ___ executors always done as they were told, literature would be immeasurably poorer. Several works now regarded as classics survive only because a friend refused to carry (6) ___ an author's dying request to burn them. Nor is it always clear that such requests were meant in earnest; some writers, it has been suggested, may have known (7) ___ along that their friends would never comply. In the end, perhaps the question is not so (8) ___ what the author wanted as what the rest of us stand to lose. Scholars and readers will doubtless continue to disagree, but few of them, one suspects, would wish those manuscripts had been burnt.

Unfinished Business

Available as a free printable PDF worksheet with an optional answer key.

More C2 Proficiency Open Cloze practice · All C2 Proficiency practice