Felkészítő tesztkönyv az angol felsőfokú ECL nyelvvizsgára

Dear Reader,

We set out to write this book to help those students of English with the courage to try the advanced level ECL language exam. It is important to know, that not many learners reach such level of knowledge, so please, take our compliments for getting to this point. The rest is easy.

This book aims to help you in this respectable endeavour. After careful examination of the possible types of exercises you might find in a real-life exam situation, we wrote ten sets of reading, writing and listening tasks with an example of how to do the exercise type with every one of them. We gathered diverse and interesting topics hoping to make your practice work not only a task to accomplish, but also a fun reading and some knowledge to gain. The CD attached to this book contains programmes recorded with native speakers of English presenting you with a diverse taste of real-life English and providing a variety of accents you would probably hear, either at the exam situation or in everyday life.

There are some general points to always keep in mind when doing any kind of exercise:

• Read the items or questions in the exercise before you start reading the texts or listening to the recordings. This makes it possible for you to prepare your brain to concentrate on certain bits of information and filter them out more successfully.
• Pay attention to slight grammatical differences between the text and the questions as those might change the meaning of the item and make you choose the wrong answer.
• Always base your answers on the text you read or the recording you hear and not your background knowledge, as all the questions are designed to be answered without any previous knowledge and what you already know might mislead you. Some of the texts might seem to be too scientific and by this, a bit scary, but all the correct answers can be found relying only on text so please, do not feel intimidated by an unknown word, rather try to find it out from the context.
• Not everybody writes like Shakespeare, but even the writing tasks can be significantly improved if you follow certain simple points. Read the task and take a moment to think about what you can write about for each point. There are always four instruction points in every writing task, and there is a logical relationship amongst the points most of the times. This might help you to build up a logical structure and clear reasoning of your writing. Even if your ideas are not the most original, this structure can give a natural flow to your message which improves the final outcome of your work.

We hope that this book will be useful and entertaining for not only those with a language exam in mind, but also for those people who would like to keep their existing level of knowledge and read something interesting.

Whatever your goal is, we would like to wish you good luck and a really fun time with this book.

As a last word, our appreciation and thanks go towards Eszter Papp for helping with the corrections and the finishing touches. Without her help, we could not have finished this book.

We are grateful to Bánhidy Anndrás, Dóra László, Dudás Tamás, Keresztesi Andrea, Kónya Tamás, Schmieder Melinda, Steppán Szabolcs, Szemjonov Kriszta, Tóth Csilla and Winter Anikó for their beautiful photographs.

James and Noémi