English B2 practice test
10 free English practice questions at B2 — upper intermediate, with answers. 97 questions in the full bank, covering 4 topics.
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10 free practice questions
Pick an answer to check it. No account needed. Every question explains why the answer is right.
- Question 1grammar
It is essential that every application ___ before Friday.
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Answer: D
After "it is essential that", English uses the subjunctive — the bare form "be submitted", with no agreement for person or tense.
- Question 2reading
The travel writer’s dilemma is that describing a place well helps to spoil it. Every account of an unvisited valley is an advertisement, however carefully it avoids naming the road in. A few writers have responded by inventing details; most simply accept the contradiction and carry on writing. What is the writer’s attitude to this dilemma?
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Answer: A
"Most simply accept the contradiction and carry on writing" is resignation — the problem is acknowledged as real and unresolved, not condemned or welcomed.
- Question 3vocabulary
The chef is known for dishes that ___ regional tradition with modern technique.
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Answer: D
To "marry" two things is to combine them so that both are improved, and it is the usual verb in writing about food. "Mingle" suggests mixing without combining, and "compound" means to make worse.
- Question 4writing
Which sentence maintains a formal register?
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Answer: B
The second is formal and attributes the judgement. The others use idiom and slang that a report would not.
- Question 5grammar
Only after we had landed ___ that our luggage was still in Frankfurt.
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Answer: A
A clause beginning "only after" inverts the subject and auxiliary in the main clause: "did we realise".
- Question 6reading
There is a peculiar snobbery about hobbies that produce nothing. Gardening is praised, chess tolerated, video games deplored — yet the mental demands of a complex strategy game exceed those of most activities that attract approval. The distinction is not about difficulty but about whether the result can be shown to somebody. What does the writer suggest the distinction really rests on?
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Answer: C
The final sentence rules out difficulty explicitly and names visibility of the result instead.
- Question 7vocabulary
Decades of neglect have left much of the housing stock in a ___ state.
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Answer: B
Dilapidated is the standard adjective for buildings that have fallen into disrepair. "Demolished" means already pulled down, and "deteriorating" describes an ongoing process rather than a state.
- Question 8writing
Which sentence uses the colon correctly?
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Answer: C
A colon introduces what the first clause has led up to. It does not take "which was" after it, and it must not split a verb from its object.
- Question 9grammar
So absorbed ___ in the book that she missed her stop entirely.
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Answer: C
When "so + adjective" is fronted for emphasis, the subject and verb invert: "so absorbed was she".
- Question 10reading
Heritage protection is defended as preserving the past, though in practice it often freezes a single moment of it. The eighteenth-century façade is retained; the nineteenth-century extension behind it, no less historic, is demolished as an intrusion. What is preserved is a preference, not a period. What point is the writer making?
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Answer: B
"What is preserved is a preference, not a period" is the argument: the selection is aesthetic, though it presents itself as historical.
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grammar · reading · vocabulary · writing