Introduction
The Cambridge English: Proficiency (CPE) is the oldest of the Cambridge EFL exams. It is designed to make sure that a student doing a university course in an English University has the language skills needed to study at this level. This course deals with more academic language, while the Advanced course is more aimed at people who need to function, for example, in an English-speaking business environment. For both of these courses, you need to have a high level of English ability. Some native English speakers would fail this exam!
In this exam candidates need to be able to make the right choice from options which are almost the same. Also, you might not be able to find answers in the text you are working from, but will have to infer the answer from the text. (If you do not understand inference you might want to look at the FCE test instead.) Candidates are expected to be able to understand colloquial language, metaphor and implicit meanings. In the practice tests below, we have not given any listening exercises, and the speaking practice only tries to show you what these tests might look like.