CAE Use of English Part 1, Test 3 – Yellow, orange, red

Answers and explanations

1. C – hold. When something or someone takes hold, it means that they become the dominant force, powerful enough to control something. ‘To take power’ needs an object, e.g. ‘to take power (away) from somebody’. ‘Take the reigns’ would work great, a beautiful and poetic phrase, but we would need the plural form for it. As you can see, for most options to work here, we are also missing the definite article.
2. B – help. If you can’t help but do something, it means you feel an urge to do it, it is too hard to resist doing it. Idiomatic expressions are common in Use of English Part 1. ‘Can’t avoid’ could work here as well, but we would need a gerund form later down the road – ‘can’t avoid doing something’.
3. B – process. Here we point at a rather complex mechanism of shedding leaves. ‘Procedure’ has a more bureaucratic meaning and fits better for something humans (rather than plants) would do. ‘Practice’ is something that happens regularly – meaning more regularly than once a year.
4. D – put. ‘Simply put’ is an expression that means explaining something in a way that is easy to understand. ‘Explained simply’ could work, however, that would require changing the word order. The remaining two options do not work nearly as well.
5. D – excessive. Spending excessive amounts of something means wasting it, spending much more than needed. ‘Extra’ just means additional – not good enough for the context we have here. ‘Ridiculous’ adds a very strong opinion that is uncalled for here. ‘Added’ does not collocate with ‘energy’ in this context.
6. C – suppressed. To suppress here means to prevent something from functioning or achieving full force. Here, green pigments suppress all others and give the leaves their natural colour. ‘To subside’ means to slowly reduce in strength or number – not the meaning we need here, as the situation is more or less constant. ‘Dominant’ does not work, but ‘dominated’ would in a way.
7. A – accumulated. To slowly gain more of something is to accumulate it. This is the only word here that conveys the idea of slow and gradual positive change.
8. B – leads. To be the reason for something. The pigmentation shift is the reason we see different leaf colours in colder autumn months. The other possible option: ‘This helps parks and forests to turn…’.