hello everyone thank you for joining me again or welcome to any new viewers this is to the point english with me ben and in this video i'm going to tell you everything you need to know in order to pass the c1 advanced cambridge exam in just 20 minutes sorry i don't know how long the video will last until i edit it later but yeah i'm going to give you a general overview of the cae cambridge english exam and this video will be useful for anyone who is just starting on their preparation journey so give you an idea of what to study and how to prepare your studies but also it will help those less prepared students who maybe have the exam next week or tomorrow or even in half an hour and you haven't prepared at all it will give you an idea of what you're going to to be faced with um in the exam itself okay so i'm going to go quite quickly because it's a lot of information but this is a video so you can rewind it and watch it again as many times as you want so grab a pen and a piece of paper and let's do this [Music] so the first thing you need to know about the c1 advanced cambridge english exam is that it consists of four papers and 18 parts the first part is the reading and use of english which lasts one and a half hours and consists of eight parts the second part is the writing which also lasts one and a half hours and has two parts the third paper is the listening which contains four parts and lasts 40 minutes and then finally you have the speaking which also has four parts and lasts about 15 minutes but the speaking paper is usually on a different day to the other papers and you do the speaking paper with a partner or sometimes in a group of three and in that case the the paper will be a little bit longer now when you sit down to do the exam you will see first of all the reading and use of english paper which consists of eight parts as i said now you are not obliged to do this part of the exam in any particular order you don't have to go from one two three four five six seven eight you can do it in whatever order you want and i have another video where i explain perhaps a more practical order to do it in where you can make better use of your time so i'll link to that in the description and some other videos which i have on on the cambridge english exams but in this video i'm just going to give you the facts and a couple of tips so in part one of the reading and use of english you'll see that you have a multiple choice closed test now this is where you have a short text of two or three paragraphs with eight gaps and of course you have to fill those gaps with the appropriate word now the good news here is that you have multiple choice options so you'll have four options for each gap when you look at the multiple choice options the words may seem very similar and usually at least two of them you think they're just synonyms i mean there's no difference so if you're not sure of the answer you think the words are exactly the same i just recommend that you read the sentence in your head with the different options so if it's two or three times just read it and instinctively or your intuition may tell you which is the correct option it may just sound better when you read it in your head but part two of the use of english is the open close test now again this is a text of two or three paragraphs with eight gaps again but in this case you don't have any options you don't have any multiple choice options that's why it's called an open close that you have to find the words from the air the good news here is that you will know these words these are not difficult words they are mostly prepositions pronouns sometimes particles are phrasal verbs they could be verbs themselves often you have the verb be in different forms may have linking words so the problem is not that you don't know the words it's that you it's difficult to know which word they are asking for to complete the sentence in a logical way in the context and part three of the reading and use of english is called the word formation again you have a short text with gaps and at the end of the line where there's a gap you'll see a word and you need to change this word to make it fit grammatically and logically into the text so what you need to do here is think about what type of word do you need is it an adjective is it an adverb is it a verb is it a noun i'd also think should it be in the positive in the negative what prefix what suffix should i use to make it fit but yeah an extra tip is to look out for the negatives sometimes you may think i've got the word because i've added the correct suffix but you don't realize or you you're not paying enough attention to see that actually they're asking for the negative so you need the the prefix to make it negative too so pay attention to that and finally part four is the key word transformation now many people think this is the most difficult part of the reading and use of english paper um which i understand but it's not that difficult if you know what they're asking of you now in this part you have six questions just six questions but you you actually get two points for for each correct answer um and you it's possible that you can get one point so you don't necessarily need to get the whole sentence correct to be able to get one point so it's always worth writing something even if you're you're completely lost so in this part you'll see a a sentence and then a key word and then another sentence with a gap now you need to fill that gap using the keyword and between three and six words um to complete a sentence which basically has the same meaning as the original sentence that you use that you see so in this part they're really testing your grammar mostly i mean there will also be some vocabulary and idioms and expressions but you usually have some grammar that you need to use so that it may be conditionals maybe the passive form it may be reported speech maybe inversions and as i said it could contain phrasal verbs um so as i said you may not know the correct preposition to go with the phrasal verb or the correct idiom that they're asking for but write something because you could get one point if you get the grammar right in this part okay let's move on to part five now which is where we're really getting to the reading part of the the paper so you have longer text from now on it's a lot more reading so you need to dedicate more time to to these parts so part five is multiple choice you'll have a long text of five or six paragraphs and then you'll have some multiple choice questions um along the side uh so you need to choose the correct option of course now this is quite difficult because you need to read for detail here um you don't have much time but you need to read relatively quickly but paying attention to to the details so a good strategy here is strategy of elimination because you you need to find something in the text which supports the answer you can't just say it i think it's probably that more or less that's about right no you need to find something specific the questions go in order following the paragraphs in the text it's usually more or less one question for each paragraph there may be an extra paragraph without a question and sometimes the last question number six is a general question on the text as a whole and part six are you still with me we've only just begun so so stay concentrated as i said you can rewind the video as many times as you want if you're if you're missing anything but number six is called the cross text multiple matching it's almost a tongue twister there but uh so here you only have four questions and you have four paragraphs um now this is pretty difficult because although you only have four questions you have to go back and forward between the different texts and the questions to find out which paragraphs agree with each other and sometimes it's very difficult actually to understand the question itself sometimes more than the text it's the question which is difficult to decipher so it's very important to to make sure you understand the question very well and then be patient because at first you may feel lost but if at the more time you spend reading the text the clearer it will get again in another video i i go into more detail about how to do this part let's move on to part seven so this part is called the gapped text it's where you have one long text but six paragraphs have been removed from the text and mixed up so you see the text and the paragraphs are missing and then on the other page you see the paragraphs in a different order and the problem here is that you you have one extra paragraph which that just doesn't fit into the text so that makes it a little bit more difficult this is all about going backwards and forwards between the text and reading really reading the last sentence of one paragraph in the main text and the first sentence of the next paragraph and to try to look for clues about how how the the text can continue uh naturally and logically again it's it's a part that gets easier the more time you spend doing it because it's quite intimidating at first but it all starts to become clear as you spend more time on it and the last part of the reading and use of english part 8 is called multiple matching and here you will see on one page a list of 10 sentences and then on the other page a text usually broken down into four five or six paragraphs and what you need to do simply is to match the sentences the ten sentences to the the paragraph so the paragraphs will be uh represented by a letter and you need to put that letter next to the sentence the correct sentence so this is not too difficult but again it's just about going back and forward between the two the two pages to to make sure you identify the correct answer again in another video i give a lot more detail about the strategies and techniques on how to pass this part of the exam but let's go on to the writing part now stay with me so the writing paper is also one and a half hours but it only consists of two parts you have to do two writing compositions so part one is an essay okay so you can be sure that you will need to write an essay there's no doubt about that it's compulsory and the essay will have to be between 220 and 260 words and in part two you'll have a choice of either a letter or an email a report a proposal and a review and this part must also be between 220 and 260 words so in part two although you have four possibilities in the exam you will only have a choice of three so really you only need to study for two of the four possibilities to be sure that you'll get one of them in the exam if your time is limited as i've said before in other videos it's really better to be prepared for all of them just in case you don't like the topic in one or two but let's move on to the listening now now the listening in some ways is quite similar to the reading but of course it's audio instead of text but part one of the listening is multiple choice and here you'll have three unrelated audios and two questions for each audio and four multiple choice options for each question and you'll have two opportunities to listen as with all the listening parts of the exam you'll have two opportunities which is very important because often people panic after the first chance to listen and think they're just completely lost and they have no chance of getting any of the questions right but if you stay calm you'll realize that the second time you'll start to understand more and it will become become clearer and part two of the listening is called sentence completion now in this part you'll hear an information monologue so it's just one person speaking for about three minutes and here you'll have some text in front of you with gaps now the text you see will be different to what you hear it's following the same information but with different words it's paraphrasing but you must fill the gaps with the exact words you hear so that sounds quite easy right you just have to listen for the words and fill them in it's not that easy because as the text you have on the paper is different to the words you hear it's easy to get lost sometimes you're not really sure where you are sometimes there could be a gap of about 30 or 40 seconds between each option um and sometimes they come very quickly like in five seconds you could get two um so you just have to pay attention the whole time stay 100 focused and again the second time you listen it will become much clearer and part three of the listening is multiple choice again but this time it's just one long audio and it's usually an interview or a discussion of some kind so the tricky part here is just paying attention enough not getting distracted or not getting lost because it's a it's a long time to be to be focusing on one conversation and the discussion will last between three and four minutes so again you have two opportunities so it's almost eight minutes in total and it's usually some kind of a broadcast so it could be a radio interview a television interview or something like that so again it's all about paying attention staying calm and listening for the detail of the answers and part four of the listening is the beast really this is the one that most people struggle with it's called multiple matching and here you will listen to five short monologues now the problem here here is that you have to do two tasks in parallel so you'll have only five speakers but you have two questions about each monologue so it's really about multitasking answering two questions at the same time again at first it may seem impossible the first time you listen but the second time i promise it gets a lot easier and starts to make sense so so just pay attention and stay calm and try to just take notes of what the first time you listen pencil in what you think is your correct answer but keep your mind open to changing your your answer because the second time you may realize that that was wrong always keep your mind open don't don't be too certain the first time because you will hear things the second time you didn't hear the first time okay let's move on to the speaking which is the last paper of the exam sometimes it's before the other papers sometimes it's after but it's usually on a different day so let's look at the four parts of the speaking so remember that the speaking is only about 15 minutes if you're just with one other partner it can be longer a little longer if it's with a group of three but usually it's just two people um so it's gonna pass very quickly when you finish you'll look back and think well what happened there you it passed in the blink of an eye when you're in the middle of it it will probably feel like an eternity but um but yeah what you need to do is to take a take this as an opportunity take advantage of the opportunity to impress the examiners so part one of the speaking it's quite simple it's just sort of we call it breaking the ice it's a warm-up activity quite relatively simple questions like where are you from are you working or studying what do you like about studying english what do you find difficult about studying english and then there may be a little bit of a more random question like do you prefer to communicate via in internet or face to face or something like that so you can't really prepare for the third question but it won't be too too difficult so hopefully you'll be relaxed now i know you've had that first um breaking the ice part because part two is pretty difficult this is where you have three pictures you'll be given three photos and you need to choose two of the photos to compare and answer two questions that you will have so the the examiner will explain the task but you will also see that the questions written above the pictures so you can refer to those but you have to do this in just one minute so it's comparing and answering the two questions which is about speculating because you don't really know what's happening in the photos you have to speculate the photographs will be quite similar they will have something in common but it's very important that you answer both of the questions within the minute so that takes a lot of practice um there will be an extra question for your partner when you finish and for you when your partner finishes so you need to pay attention to what your partner says when they speak about their pictures but that question won't be too difficult and it's you just need a short about 20-second answer part three of the speaking again it's quite difficult and this is the first time you interact with your partner where you actually have a conversation with your partner you'll see a diagram like this with a question in the middle and then five prompts around the outside you need to answer the question and try to refer to each of the prompts and you'll have two minutes to do this you'll need to make sure that you are communicating well with your partner that you have a good fluent natural conversation as much as possible and then after that you'll get an extra question for both you and your partner which you have one minute to answer well you'll need to take some kind of a decision or at least try to come to some kind of decision together so the the question will be basically choosing one of the prompts or maybe two of the prompts from the the diagram and you need to try to with your partner to agree on a decision you're not obliged to agree in the end you can disagree but it's about the process of trying to agree um and then part four the last part of the exam is just some more general questions about the same theme in part three but just to have a nice fluent natural conversation with your partner i think for me this is the big opportunity for you to really demonstrate your level demonstrate the vocabulary you have so you can't really prepare for this in any way but just be ready for this last four about four minutes of conversation with your partner the the examiner will ask you questions as necessary they will have a list of questions if they have to ask one two or three or four it doesn't matter but you have to try to maintain a good conversation not just two monologues you need to have a conversation with your partner so ask their opinion and make it as natural and fluent as possible and that's it that's the c1 advanced cambridge english exam also known as the cae it's easy right well obviously it's not easy and now you can see why you usually need a few months to prepare it's not just about having the level it's about knowing how to pass the exam how to do the exam strategies and tips and tricks so whether you have your preparation process ahead of you or you have your exam in half an hour i hope this video helped check out my other videos because i have a lot now on the cambridge english exams which will really help you hit the subscribe button and i'll see you very soon for another video take care bye