30-day challenge for C2

Hi everyone! For today, let's go back to the very beginning. Do you remember the first challenge, 16 days ago? It had four little tests on make/do. There is somethig about testing ourselves that appeals to our competitive nature. So I thought I'd make use of that competitiveness to lure you into today's challenge. Would you like to push yourselves? What about one of the hardest tasks in the Proficiency exam? For today's challenge: - Go to this page and read the advice for Proficiency open cloze tests. - Test yourself on the five big areas that go into this exercise: pronouns, articles and determiners, conjunctions and linking phrases, prepositional phrases and phrasal verbs, and collocations. That is, do the five tests proposed on the page. - Share your results with us! See you in the comments!

... if you want to continue on your quest. I am still in a playful mood! I am a fan of the animated riddles on TED-Ed, and I found this one, which has the flair of medieval knight riddles. Here's the challenge for today! - Tell us if you could solve the riddle! - Give us your five favourite words from this video. As an extra, this challenge reminded me of a song I love a lot, Koeeoaddi There , by The Incredible String Band. The chorus (or kind of) goes like this: Earth, water, fire and air Met together in a garden fair, Put in a basket bound with skin. If you answer this riddle, If you answer this riddle, You'll never begin. Listen to it if you want to get into the mood for the riddle. Enjoy, brave knights!

Hi everyone! Day 15 is here! How hard was it to get this far? You're halfway through! For this day, I'm feeling a bit playful. And what is the word game  par excellence? Scrabble! This challenge is somehow related with Scrabble, in that I'm asking you to find as many words as you can with the letters that form a word. Say, for instance, that our word is WORD. Your goal is to find as many possible combinations with the letters W, O, R, D as you can. They must be accepted by the dictionary, of course! Some examples would be rod , dow , or row . With two letters, we could make the words or and  do (but the longer, the better!) The challenge, then, is the following: - Give us as many existing words as you can made up of the letters in the words given below. Classify them by number of letters (in our example: 3 - rod, dow, row; 2 - or, do). - And that's it. That's all we need! And since day fifteen splits our challenge in half, the words we propose are ...

Hi everyone! What a lovely sunny day. Come to think of it, you may open this post on a miserable rainy evening. But if you happen to visit the blog today, you're likely to be enjoying a bit of sunshine. What does this have to do with today's challenge? Well, as I was enjoying the light in my living room, I thought about how the room was alight today. Alight . What a beautiful word. It has so many meanings, and all of them are just wonderful! Talk about favourite words! One of the things that is special about this word (as an adjective--it's also a really cool verb) is that it is one of those adjectives with a- that can only appear in predicative position, that is, only in the predicate, and never preceding the noun: I could never say "the alight room", but I'd have to think, as it occurred to me this morning, that the room was alight. The challenge for today is: - Read the following sentences and transform them so that the adjective follows the ...

Hi everyone! These are days of wishing and hoping. Hoping that everyone around us keeps well, hoping that we will come out stronger, wishing we could do more. We hope that what we're doing is useful, in our own little way. But can we use wish and hope correctly? There are some small intricacies to the use of these two verbs, which may cause a bit of trouble even at higher levels. All of these sentences   contain errors made by students at Proficiency level. Can you find them? For today's challenge:  - Spot the error in each sentence and correct it.  - Tell us in the comments what you found, and what you think are the main rules of use of hope and wish that the errors illustrate. Hope and wish to your heart's content today! 1. I do wish I will turn out to be a good doctor. 2. She wishes she would be more positive about the future. 3. I hope you to have a pleasant stay. 4. I wish I will be able to suppress my laughter when he speaks, but I can't. 5. I...

Hi everyone! I can't help bringing you one of my favourite activities: finding vocabulary in videos. And here is one that is short, educational, and natural. Apart from the fact that it is related to what we're seeing right now in C2.2 (technology, and simple machinery in this case), the conversational tone of Stephen Colbert in this short video is what really got to me. So here's our challenge for day 12: - Find at least three expressions that you could use naturally in conversation. - What do they mean? Can you find another way of saying the same thing or are these phrases really unique for the idea they want to express? Tell us in the comments! Enjoy here Stephen Colbert changing a bike inner tube!

Hi everyone! We're still on time! But don't worry,this will be quick, because it's about not doing something. What consonants are not pronounced in these words? Can you pronounce them all together, like a tongue twister? For today's challenge: - Tell us what the silent consonant is in each word. - Which is the most difficult to pronounce for you?  - In one of the words, w hich letter is pronounced that normally is not? - Have you learnt any new words with this list?  Enjoy! knowledge wretched rustled rhythm heir coup indebted exhilarating denouement pseudonym doubt mnemonic condemn apropos penchant