English for Proficiency [antikvár]

Preface The main purpose of this book is to help students prepare for the Certificate of Proficiency in English examination of the Local Examinations Syndicate of the University of Cambridge. Many of the exercises are of the type found in the 'English Language' and 'Use of English' papers of that examination. At the same time the book should prove of value to anyone who has reached a fairly advanced stage in the study of English as a second language. I believe that while there is an abundance of good textbooks for the teaching of English to adult learners in the early stages, there is a lack of suitable books for the later stages. All the reading passages are taken from broadcast articles published in The Listener between 1958 and i960. They are not simplified in any way, and present examples of contemporary English prose covering a wide range of subjects. Since the maiority of people learning English today are doing so not in order to study our literature but in order to improve their professional qualifications, I believe that the English they select for close study should be of the kind that they are likely to need to read and write for themselves, rather than the kind which, for want of a more precise term, is usually described as literary. The fact that the articles were originally written for broadcasting, that is for speaking, means that the language presents few problems of style. This kind of language might be called 'Considered Spoken English'. With one or two deliberate exceptions, included for the sake of variety, it is neither too colloquial, nor too formal, nor too 'literary'; and such difficulties of vocabulary and idiom as a student at this level might be expected to encounter are explained in footnotes. All the exercises are derived from the passages. The intention is to oblige the reader to study the text closely, and in this way to focus his attention on the structure of the language. In such exercises as are not of the examination type, sentence patterns of relatively high