C2 Proficiency Open Cloze Practice

C2 Proficiency (CPE) · Reading & Use of English Part 2 · 69 free exercises

A text with eight gaps and no options — you supply each missing word yourself. Open cloze is a pure grammar test: articles, prepositions, pronouns, auxiliary verbs, linkers and fixed expressions. One word per gap, and spelling must be correct.

Open Cloze: The part that tests grammar, not vocabulary.

8 — gaps
No options — you supply the word
1 mark — per gap
~8 min — of your paper

Your command of the grammar glue — prepositions, articles, pronouns, linkers, auxiliaries and the particles of phrasal verbs. If you reach for an interesting word, you have misread the gap.

What real learners get wrong: Across 2,624 real C2 gaps, learners get 42% wrong — the difficulty is seeing the small grammar word under dense, formal prose.

The method

Read the whole text first for meaning — some answers depend on a different sentence.
Name the job before the word: preposition? linker? pronoun? auxiliary? That shrinks the candidates.
Look left and right — the trigger is often after the gap ("not only … but", "view … as").
Check the fixed patterns: collocations, phrasal verbs, idioms, correlatives.
Reread the sentence with your word in it — it must fit the grammar and the meaning. Never leave a blank.

The traps

The content-word habit: Filling the gap with a noun or adjective that "sounds right". If your answer is an interesting word, re-check the job of the gap.
Word pairs split in half: Correlatives like "not only … but" — the gap is one half; the other half comes later in the sentence.
The many jobs of "as": The most-tested word: view as, known as, as well as, just as. When no word fits, try "as".
Relatives with prepositions: in which / of whom / whose — writing "which/that" loses the mark when the preposition changed the pronoun.
One word means one word: Contractions count as two, and a right word spelled wrong scores zero — this part gives no partial credit.

All Open Cloze exercises

Cambridge English Proficiency 1, Cambridge University Press

Cambridge English Proficiency 2, Cambridge University Press

Close-up C2 Workbook, National Geographic Learning

Close-up C2, National Geographic Learning

Expert Proficiency Resource Book, Pearson Education

Expert Proficiency, Pearson Education

Objective Proficiency 2nd Edition Workbook, Cambridge University Press

Objective Proficiency 2nd Edition, Cambridge University Press

Henri Cartier-Bresson - Exam Folder 2