Reading Part 3 — Multiple Choice for the CPE Exam

Common failure modes

These are the patterns that cause most candidates to lose marks on this topic. Recognising them in advance is half the work.

• !Selecting an option because it contains familiar words from the text, not because it answers the question
• !Misreading the scope of a question (asked about a paragraph, answering about the whole text)
• !Overlooking qualifications and hedges in both the text and the answer options

Study tips

• 1Read comprehension questions as precisely as possible — every word in the question matters.
• 2For inference questions, identify the precise text evidence before committing to an answer.
• 3Practise reading long literary extracts from C2 texts (James, Woolf, Nabokov) and analysing their implied meanings.

Sample CPE Reading Part 3 — Multiple Choice questions

These sample items mirror the format and difficulty of real CPE questions. Practice with thousands more on the free Koydo question bank.

1. 1

   A passage says: "The critic's assessment, delivered with all the certainty of the uninformed, missed the central irony entirely." The author's tone toward the critic is:

   • AAdmiring and respectful
   • BGently encouraging
   • CSharply satirical and dismissiveCorrect
   • DNeutral and analytical
   Why this answer?

   "All the certainty of the uninformed" is a satirical construction — the paradox of being certain while uninformed is itself the critique. "Missed the central irony entirely" adds dismissal. The author is clearly contemptuous of the critic's certainty-without-knowledge. This is a C2-level irony recognition question.