10 Article Practice Questions with Answers | Cambridge C2 Proficiency
In Part 2 of the Cambridge C2 Proficiency (CPE) Writing paper, you choose one task from a list, and an article is one of the options. You read a situation, then write an article of 280 to 320 words for a magazine or website. This post gives you 10 C2 Proficiency article practice questions with model answers. Each answer is written at C2 level and shows how to open with a strong hook, develop each part of the task with a clear voice, and finish with a resonant closing thought.
Article 1
An international working-life magazine is publishing articles about learning to estimate honestly how long work will take. Write an article describing how your own estimating practice changed after a significant mistake or discovery. Explain what now informs your estimates, and assess how individual judgement can remain realistic when an organisation wants an earlier answer.
Write your article in 280 to 320 words.
Model answer
The estimate I stopped calling a promise
I once told a project manager that a research summary would take three days. I had completed similar documents in that time, and the earlier date made the whole schedule look possible. Six days later, I was still resolving contradictory sources. My estimate had described uninterrupted writing under familiar conditions, not the work actually in front of me.
I now separate duration from elapsed time. First, I identify stages such as locating evidence, checking it, drafting and review. For each stage, I record the time spent on comparable work rather than relying on the vivid memory of one unusually smooth project. I then name dependencies. If another team must approve terminology, two hours of their work may occupy three days on my calendar. Finally, I give a range and state what would move the task towards either end.
This is not an excuse for generous padding. Ranges become useless when every uncertainty is quietly added at its worst value. I distinguish ordinary variation, which belongs in the estimate, from a specific risk requiring a decision. If the deadline cannot move, scope or review depth must become explicit alternatives.
Organisational pressure complicates honesty. An early estimate is often treated as commitment, while a later revision is read as failure. Managers can improve accuracy by asking for assumptions and confidence before asking for one date. Workers, however, must resist offering the desired answer and attaching qualifications so faintly that nobody can act on them. I now write, "five to seven working days, assuming access on Monday", rather than saying five days and hoping.
An estimate should support a decision, not win approval for a plan already chosen. Mine became more useful when I stopped presenting optimism as efficiency. The most professional answer is sometimes a later date accompanied by a clear account of what the time protects.
Article 2
An international travel magazine is publishing articles about deliberately limiting advance planning. Write an article describing a journey on which you left one whole day unplanned, explaining how you made decisions during that day, and assessing what spontaneity added and what risks it created.
Write your article in 280 to 320 words.
Model answer
The day I left off the itinerary
Every other page of my notebook was crowded with times, platforms and confirmation numbers. One page, deliberately, was blank: a single day in Lisbon with nothing booked and nowhere I had to be. I had grown suspicious of my own planning, which tended to turn a holiday into a schedule to be completed rather than a place to be met.
Decisions that day arrived through the senses rather than a list. I followed the smell of grilled sardines into a courtyard restaurant no guide had mentioned, then took a hilltop tram simply because its number was one I had not yet ridden. When a street musician drew a small crowd, I stayed for an hour I had not costed, and when a downpour began, I sheltered in a bookshop and left with a novel and a conversation. Each choice was small, easily reversed, and shaped by what was actually in front of me.
What spontaneity added was attention. Without a timetable to protect, I noticed the ordinary texture of the city: laundry strung between windows, the particular light on tiled walls, the rhythm of a place going about its afternoon. The day felt longer and more mine than the carefully arranged ones on either side of it.
The risks were real and worth naming. I wasted an hour at a closed viewpoint I could have checked in advance, paid more for an unresearched meal, and missed a museum that turned out to shut early. Spontaneity trades efficiency for discovery, and it quietly assumes a margin of time and money to absorb the mistakes.
I would not plan a whole trip this way. But one unplanned day, held open on purpose, taught me more about the city, and about my own restlessness, than any itinerary I have ever completed.
Article 3
An international management-innovation journal is examining roles jointly funded by several small organisations. Write an article describing how one shared specialist role works. Evaluate the benefits of access to expertise and the risks involving divided loyalties, confidentiality and continuity, and explain when this employment model is appropriate.
Write your article in 280 to 320 words.
Model answer
A specialist divided, not diluted
Three neighbourhood charities in my region jointly employ one data-protection specialist. Each organisation could previously afford only occasional legal advice, usually after a problem. Together they fund a full-time post: two fixed days belong to the largest charity, one to each smaller partner, and Fridays are reserved for training, urgent incidents and shared policy work.
The arrangement has transformed access. The specialist understands each organisation's services well enough to identify risks before forms or databases are launched. Common templates reduce duplicated work, while joint training gives small teams standards they could not develop alone. Because the role spans organisations, useful lessons travel quickly between them.
Sharing also creates tensions. An urgent request from one partner can consume time promised to another. Confidential information about a complaint or security weakness must never become an informal example elsewhere. Most importantly, the specialist needs authority to refuse a shared policy when different services require different safeguards. Efficiency must not become forced uniformity.
The partners address these risks through a written allocation agreement, separate document systems and a steering meeting chaired in rotation. Emergency work is logged, and lost time is restored within the month. Performance is assessed against each charity's needs as well as common projects, so the largest funder cannot quietly become the real employer. The steering group also publishes a quarterly capacity table, allowing each partner to see which recurring requests are consuming shared time and why.
This model suits specialist work that is continuous but not full-time within any one small organisation. It is less suitable where loyalty to a single leadership team or immediate daily presence is essential. Joint employment widens access without weakening expertise, provided boundaries are explicit and the specialist, rather than the loudest partner, controls professional judgement.
Article 4
An international language-and-environment magazine is publishing articles about local vocabulary for natural conditions. Write an article describing several local names for winds, explaining the practical and cultural knowledge they contain, and assessing both the value and the limits of preserving such terms.
Write your article in 280 to 320 words.
Model answer
The names we give the wind
Where I grew up on the coast, no one spoke simply of "wind". There was the maestrale, the dry northwester that cleared the sky and flattened the sea into hammered metal; the scirocco, which arrived warm and gritty from the south and left a film of desert dust on every windowsill; and the marino, a damp onshore breeze that the older fishermen trusted more than any forecast. Each name carried instructions.
These words are compressed knowledge. To say scirocco is not only to name a direction but to predict headaches, heavy air, and washing that will never quite dry. The maestrale told you when the small boats could go out and when the afternoon would turn cold. A single term bundled weather, farming, health and seamanship into something a child could learn and an old hand could rely on. The vocabulary was a practical instrument, refined over generations by people whose safety depended on reading the air correctly.
I would not pretend, though, that preserving these names is without complication. They belong to a particular coast, and they do not travel; a fisherman two hundred kilometres away used different words for what felt like the same wind. As the boats grow larger and the forecasts more precise, the terms risk becoming decoration, quoted in tourist brochures while the knowledge behind them thins. A word kept without its practice is a shell.
Still, I think the effort is worth making. These names record how a community once thought with the weather rather than merely enduring it. Learn them, and you inherit not just a vocabulary but a way of paying attention, one that no satellite image, however exact, entirely restores.
Article 5
An international food-systems website is publishing articles about public meals made from produce rejected for appearance rather than quality. Describe a community meal of this kind, explain how ingredients and participants were organised, and consider whether such events can produce lasting change in food-waste systems.
Write your article in 280 to 320 words.
Model answer
A meal that made rejection visible
Last autumn, a growers' cooperative delivered 300 kilograms of edible produce rejected by retailers to our community kitchen. Bent carrots, scarred squash and undersized apples became a public meal for 180 people. The aim was not to disguise the ingredients but to show exactly why they had been excluded.
Volunteer cooks worked with three farmers and a food-safety coordinator. Recipes were chosen only after the delivery arrived, since quantity and condition could not be predicted. At each table, cards traced one ingredient from field to retailer specification, while growers explained which imperfections affect storage and which are merely visual. Organisers also invited two supermarket buyers, whose questions exposed how cosmetic standards are embedded in automated ordering systems. Guests paid what they wished, and surplus portions were chilled for a local night shelter.
The meal changed assumptions effectively. Several visitors admitted that they equated uniform appearance with freshness, and the farmers' presence prevented the event becoming a simple lecture about careless consumers. Retail contracts, harvesting costs and unreliable secondary markets were clearly more important than individual taste.
That insight also revealed the event's limit. Volunteers cannot absorb unpredictable tonnes of produce, and a celebratory meal may make waste look easily recoverable. Lasting change requires retailers to widen specifications, publish rejection data and offer growers guaranteed routes for safe surplus before harvest decisions are made. Public kitchens need transport and cold storage, not occasional donations arriving without notice.
The cooperative has since secured a weekly order from two school caterers for mixed-size vegetables. That modest contract matters more than the photographs from the meal. Events like ours are worthwhile when they create relationships, evidence and purchasing commitments. If they end with praise for inventive soup, they risk turning a structural failure into an attractive evening.
Article 6
An international material-culture magazine is publishing articles about everyday objects whose wear reveals how they were used. Write an article describing one such object and explaining what its marks disclose about people or practice. Consider when restoration protects an object's value and when it may erase evidence that should remain visible.
Write your article in 280 to 320 words.
Model answer
What the handle remembers
My grandfather's plane, a wooden tool for smoothing timber, sits on my shelf with one corner of its handle worn smooth and slightly hollow. The wear is not damage. It is the exact shape of a right hand that held the tool tens of thousands of times, always at the same angle, always pushing away from the body. Where the varnish has gone, the grain is polished by skin rather than sandpaper.
The marks disclose more than ownership. The uneven wear on the sole tells me he favoured long, confident strokes; a small repair, clumsier than his other work, suggests a break he mended in a hurry rather than replace. A faint darkening near the blade records years of a particular oil. None of this is written anywhere, yet the object testifies to a way of working with a precision that no photograph of him ever managed.
This is why restoration troubles me. I could have the handle refinished and the sole re-flattened, and the plane would look cared for and nearly new. It would also be silent. The polish of a palm, the hurried repair, the darkened wood: each is evidence, and evidence, once sanded away, does not return. A restorer who removes it in the name of value has quietly destroyed the very thing that made the object more than a shape.
There are objects that should be repaired, of course, so that they can go on being used. But wear that records a person is closer to handwriting than to dirt. Before we make an old thing pristine, we might ask what its imperfections are telling us, and whether we have any right to erase a testimony we did not write.
Article 7
An international adult-learning website is publishing a series called Beginning again . Write an article about returning to an advanced skill after a break of at least ten years. Describe what had changed, explain how your previous expertise both helped and hindered you, and consider what adults can gain from becoming beginners again.
Write your article in 280 to 320 words.
Model answer
Beginning again: returning to the printing press
Twelve years after leaving a community print studio, I enrolled in an advanced letterpress workshop expecting my hands to remember more than my mind. They did, briefly. I could lock type into a frame and judge ink by its faint sound on the rollers. Then I met a studio transformed by photopolymer plates, digital layout files and new safety procedures.
Previous experience gave me useful patience. I knew that a fraction of a millimetre matters, that the first impression is evidence rather than failure, and that cleaning is part of making. It also made me oddly resistant. I kept arranging type by methods suited to equipment the studio no longer owned and interpreted unfamiliar efficiency as a lowering of standards. A younger classmate eventually asked why I was defending a process whose purpose I could not explain.
The decisive exercise required us to print the same short text using metal type and a digitally prepared plate. Comparing the results revealed that neither method was inherently more authentic. Each made different choices visible. Metal type encouraged revision through physical constraint; the plate allowed complex spacing but tempted us to finalise too early on screen. The workshop also showed that relearning deserves time: confidence returned in flashes, while unfamiliar methods required the repetition I once resisted.
Becoming a beginner again is uncomfortable because competence has become part of one's identity. Yet that discomfort separates genuine judgement from habit protected by seniority. Adults returning to a skill should seek instruction rather than private practice, state what they once knew without demanding that it remain central, and choose at least one technique with no familiar equivalent.
I did not recover my old expertise. I acquired a more useful relationship with it: evidence to question, not a position to defend.
Article 8
An international civic-design magazine is publishing a series called Behind the systems we depend on . Write an article describing a public open day you attended at a municipal flood-control pumping station. Explain what the visit revealed about the system and the people operating it, and consider whether essential facilities should offer such access despite security and operational constraints.
Write your article in 280 to 320 words.
Model answer
The day they opened the pumping station
For most of my life the flood-control pumping station at the edge of town was a locked brick building I had never once thought about. It was only on an advertised open day, walking between engines the size of small houses, that I understood the effort keeping the streets behind me dry.
The visit revealed a system I had taken entirely for granted. Beneath the floor, screens filtered debris from the incoming water; above, pumps that could move an astonishing volume in minutes stood ready for storms that arrive a few times a decade. What struck me more than the machinery, though, was the staff. A small team monitored gauges through the night, rehearsed failures that had not happened in years, and spoke about the river with the wary respect of people who know exactly what it can do. One engineer showed us the worn logbook in which every test is still entered by hand, a habit older than the computers humming beside it. Their competence was invisible precisely because it worked.
Whether such places should open at all is a fair question. A pumping station is a critical facility, and every visitor is a potential risk to security and a distraction from operations. An open day consumes staff time and exposes layouts that are safer kept quiet.
Yet I left convinced the access was worth its cost. A public that never sees its infrastructure cannot value it, fund it, or forgive the disruption when it is maintained. The visit turned an anonymous building into something I now understand and would vote to protect. Carefully managed, with sensitive areas closed and staff prepared, occasional openness seems a small price for the trust and support that essential systems ultimately depend on.
Article 9
An international family-history magazine is publishing articles about modest private records that become valuable over time. Write an article describing a personal weather diary, explaining what it can reveal about daily life and local change, and assessing the limits of using such a record as evidence.
Write your article in 280 to 320 words.
Model answer
The Forecast Nobody Intended to Publish
My great-aunt's weather diary was never meant to become family history. From 1968 to 1992, she entered temperature, cloud, wind and rainfall in a school exercise book, adding no more than one line about the day. Yet those compressed notes now reveal a household and a neighbourhood more vividly than many formal records.
Weather supplied the diary's structure, but daily life entered through consequences. Frost meant the first bus failed to climb the hill; a dry week brought neighbours to borrow a hose; prolonged rain moved a birthday meal into the narrow front room. Repeated references to washing, coal deliveries and the river path show how ordinary routines depended on conditions that modern family accounts rarely mention.
The record also suggests local change. Fog entries decline after domestic heating changed, while summer notes increasingly mention heat inside the house rather than pleasure in the garden. Such patterns are intriguing, but they are not measurements from a controlled station. The thermometer moved twice, missing pages cluster in winter, and the writer recorded what disrupted her rather than everything that occurred.
Used carefully, the diary can be compared with official weather data, transport notices and other residents' accounts. Disagreement is informative: it shows the difference between regional measurement and conditions experienced on one street. What it cannot do is prove a long-term trend by itself. Family historians should also preserve the original notebook, since later transcription may silently regularise spelling, dates or uncertain figures.
Personal weather diaries deserve preservation not because every figure is authoritative, but because they connect climate to consequence. Their value lies at the boundary between observation and autobiography, where a brief note about rain can recover the shape of an otherwise unrecorded day.
Article 10
An international literary magazine is publishing articles about overlooked features that help readers navigate demanding non-fiction books. Write an article describing an index that changed how you used one book, explaining the choices that made it useful, and assessing what digital search cannot replace.
Write your article in 280 to 320 words.
Model answer
In praise of a good index
I used to treat the index of a book as an afterthought, a list to consult only when I had lost something. Then I read a dense history whose index was so intelligently made that it changed how I used the entire book, and I have paid attention to indexes ever since.
What made it useful was judgement, not completeness. Rather than recording every place a word appeared, it distinguished a passing mention from a sustained discussion, and marked the latter in bold. It gathered scattered ideas under headings the author never used as chapter titles, so that a theme running quietly through the book could suddenly be read on its own. Cross-references sent me from an effect to its cause. Someone had read the whole book on my behalf and mapped not its words but its arguments.
This is precisely what digital search cannot replace. A search box finds strings; it cannot tell an important treatment from an incidental one, cannot group ideas that never share a keyword, and cannot understand that two different phrases mean the same thing. It returns everything and ranks nothing by significance. Search answers the question you already know how to ask. A good index answers the question you did not.
I am not nostalgic about paper for its own sake. But an index is a work of interpretation, quietly authored by a human who understood the book, and we lose something real when we assume that a search function makes it redundant. The next time a non-fiction book earns your trust, turn to the back before you close it. You may find that the most useful chapter was the one written last, and read least.