FCE Use of English Part 2, Bake your own bread

Answers and explanations

9. Far. When you go as far as to do something, it means that it takes a lot of time or effort to do it. Therefore, the phrase can be used to indicate one’s surprise or respect for somebody’s action, e.g., ‘To make his girlfriend’s birthday party memorable, he went as far as to invite her favourite band to the celebration’.
10. Too. To indicate that something is not difficult at all, you use the set expression ‘almost too easy’.
11. For. This one is not difficult at all, however some students can be tricked into giving ‘during’ as the answer.
12. Into. A phrasal verb, it means to give something a particular shape. It can also be used figuratively and mean to make a person have certain skills or opinions, e.g., ‘Our university has been shaping young men and women into employable professionals for almost a century’.
13. An. We always say ‘half an hour’, and never – ‘half of hour’. A common ESL mistake that one should be wary of.
14. Why. ‘Why bother’ is an informal expression and a rhetorical question that requires no answer. Instead, it questions why somebody should perform an action that doesn’t seem to make much sense in this particular context.
15. With. To compete with something (or someone) here means to be compared to it, e.g., ‘Old cars can’t compete with modern ones when it comes to fuel efficiency’.
16. No. Of course, we would normally go like ‘there aren’t any unwanted ingredients’, but here we are limited to one word in the gap, so we have to go with the structure ‘there are no unwanted ingredients’.