CAE Use of English Part 2, Test 2 – Practical effects

Answers and explanations

9. Must/should. We have a condition and its result – if you know anything about movies, you are very likely to know that computers are extensively used for special effects.
10. Is. ‘What this means is…’ is the case of a cleft sentence – a special structure that makes the message more emphatic (adds expression to it).
11. On. Note that it is ‘on the screen’, but ‘in the picture, in the photo’. Prepositions can be very misleading if you use your native language as a point of reference.
12. From. ‘To tell something from something else’ means to be able to see the difference between these two things, to distinguish them.
13. Away. The idea here is that knowing the special effects are not ‘real’ makes the film much less enjoyable. ‘To take away from something’ is to make it less valuable or desirable.
14. Battle. If you fight a losing battle, it means you are trying to achieve something that is unlikely to happen, or there are some factors that prevent you from achieving that.
15. Come. A thing, person or quality that is hard to come by is rare, and therefore difficult to find.
16. Have. Interestingly, we can technically leave this gap empty and turn a present perfect sentence into a past simple one without hurting the meaning. However, in CAE Use of English Part 2 no gap should be left empty – so we add the auxiliary ‘have’ to complete a past perfect sentence.