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Exam guide & reading text

Restoring a Working ArchivePart 2: Open Cloze

"Restoring a Working Archive" targets the Open Cloze (Part 2) of the Cambridge C1 Proficiency exam. Unlike Part 1, no options are provided — you must supply single words (articles, prepositions, auxiliaries, pronouns, conjunctions or discourse markers) that complete the text grammatically and logically. Scan each gap for the grammatical slot it occupies: is it linking clauses, marking reference, or completing a fixed structure? Small words carry heavy weight at C2 level.

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Reading text

An archive is more than a room full of old papers. Its value depends on how materials are arranged, described and made available. When a collection is moved (9) .......... a new building, every box must be tracked, even if the labels look obvious at first. Archivists (10) .......... work with private letters must also decide what information can be shared without harming living people. Some items (11) .......... written for public reading, while others were never meant to travel beyond a family. (12) .......... preservation is important, access matters too: documents that cannot be found may as well not exist. For this reason, (13) .......... catalogue should explain where an item came (14) .........., how it relates to other materials and why it may matter. A clear system is valuable, (15) .......... it should leave room for future discoveries. The best archive does not claim to tell the whole story but (16) .......... helps people ask better questions.