Use of English - Multiple Choice
C2
Cambridge English C2 Exam
For questions 1-8, read the text below and decide which answer (A, B, C or D) best fits each gap. Click the gaps to type your answer.
Art and Sound
For many people, the arts are too readily divided into separate disciplines, as though painting, sculpture and music were best appreciated in isolation. Yet history repeatedly shows the opposite: creative movements often emerge when artists work across conventional (0) BOUNDARIES. In the early twentieth century, for instance, composers and painters alike sought to break (1) .......... from inherited rules, rejecting mere imitation in favour of experiment. What linked them was not simply a shared taste for novelty, but a deeper conviction that art should (2) .......... the spirit of its age. Music, with its invisible architecture, seemed particularly suited to expressing the tensions of modern life, while visual artists attempted to capture movement, rhythm and even noise on canvas. This exchange was not merely theoretical. Many painters were deeply (3) .......... in music, and some composers borrowed ideas from colour, pattern and design. Critics at the time often struggled to account (4) .......... such innovation, partly because the old vocabulary of judgement no longer seemed adequate. Works once dismissed as chaotic later came to be regarded as landmarks, and audiences gradually learned to listen and look with greater patience. The lesson may be that the arts do not simply coexist; they (5) .......... one another. A melody may sharpen our sense of line, just as an image may (6) .......... a musical phrase with new emotional force. To study one form seriously is therefore not to neglect the others, but to become more (7) .......... to the many ways human imagination takes shape. In that sense, the arts are less separate languages than different accents of the same creative (8) ..........
About Use of English Multiple Choice — Cambridge English C2
This is a Cambridge English C2 Use of English Multiple Choice exercise. Read the text and decide which word — A, B, C or D — best fits each of the 8 gaps.
Multiple Choice questions test your vocabulary in context: collocations, phrasal verbs, linking words and words with similar but slightly different meanings. Practising C2 exercises like this builds the instinct to choose the right option quickly in the real exam.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many questions does this C2 Multiple Choice exercise have?
It has 8 gaps, and each gap gives you four options (A–D) to choose from.
What does Cambridge Use of English Multiple Choice test?
It focuses on vocabulary in context — collocations, phrasal verbs, fixed phrases and words that look similar but are not interchangeable.
How can I get better at Multiple Choice?
Read widely, learn words together with the words they combine with, and always read the whole sentence — including the words after the gap — before choosing your answer.
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What to do
In this part, you read a text with eight gaps and choose the best word from four options to fit each gap.
Nothing prepares you for this test better than reading.
Read a lot. Candidates who often read in English (for work, for fun) find this part of the test manageable, while those who never read tend to find it very hard.
If you are 100% sure that two of the 4 choices are completely identical, then neither can be the answer. There is always only one word that fits grammatically and has the right meaning.
Usually the correct option will be part of a fixed phrase or collocation, a phrasal verb, a connector or the only word that fits grammatically in the gap.
Strategy
- Read the title and the whole text quickly to understand its general meaning before you attempt the task.
- Check the words before and after the gap.
- Choose the best option.
- When you have finished, read the text again with the words inserted to check that it makes sense.
