Order! Order! Cambridge exams Reading and Use of English papers
How many papers are there in the Cambridge B2 First and C1 Advanced exams? Do you know what each paper is worth in terms of your overall score? Of course, there are four papers. Three of them are worth 20% each and one of them is worth 40%. How strange! If I had asked the same questions prior to 2015 the answers would have been different. Then there were five papers all worth 20%. So what happened? Well, in 2015 Cambridge decided to merge two of the papers, Reading and Use of English. So now this one paper is worth nearly half the marks. So, it must be really long, right? Actually no it isn’t, relatively speaking. In the B2 First it takes 75 minutes and in the C1 Advanced it takes 90 minutes. The Writing paper in the B2 First is longer, and in the C1 Advanced it’s the same length. But it’s only worth half as many marks. In total, the B2 First exam last about three and a half hours, and the C1 Advanced lasts about four hours. So these papers take up just over a third of the exam and rep...