Free Exercises: Cambridge ESOL Exercises
Exam: FCE CAE CPE
Exercise: Multiple Choice Cloze Open Cloze Word Formation Gapped Sentences Keyword Transformation
CAE Mulitlple Choice Cloze: The Credit Crunch
For questions 1-12, read the text below and decide which answer (A, B, C or D) best fits each gap. There is an example at the beginning (0).
Mark your answers on the separate answer sheet below.
Example
| 0 | A lend | B loan | C borrow | D owe |
|---|
| 0 |
|---|
People in Britain have really begun to notice the credit crunch now that it has become much harder to (0) money from banks. Whether they are (1) rich, or merely struggling to pay off a modest-sized (2) , everybody is going to be effected in one way or another by the (3) downturn and the end of the housing (4) . For the next year, at least, we will probably have to pay over the (5) to get credit and more and more people will find themselves tempted by two for the (6) offers in supermarkets.
It's at times like these that politicians and the economists who work for them start desperately searching for (7) that might suggest the first green (8) of recovery are appearing. But right now, in the first half of 2009, nearly every market (9) in the UK economy is reporting lower profits and the housing market is still depressed.
It's a depressing time for house-owners as the (10) housing market pushes the value of their houses lower and lower. And there is little chance that falling house prices are going to reach (11) any time soon. This, in turn, means that house-owners will be unable to sell their properties without (12) heavy losses. But one group of people may benefit from the current situation. People who were in the past unable to afford the high cost of buying a house are looking forward to a time when they can finally manage to get a foot on the bottom rung of the housing ladder.
It's at times like these that politicians and the economists who work for them start desperately searching for (7) that might suggest the first green (8) of recovery are appearing. But right now, in the first half of 2009, nearly every market (9) in the UK economy is reporting lower profits and the housing market is still depressed.
It's a depressing time for house-owners as the (10) housing market pushes the value of their houses lower and lower. And there is little chance that falling house prices are going to reach (11) any time soon. This, in turn, means that house-owners will be unable to sell their properties without (12) heavy losses. But one group of people may benefit from the current situation. People who were in the past unable to afford the high cost of buying a house are looking forward to a time when they can finally manage to get a foot on the bottom rung of the housing ladder.