Key Word Transformations

Cambridge call this task 'Key Word Transformations', but a better name would be 'Controlled Paraphrase under Pressure'. The task gives you a sentence, a single capitalised keyword you cannot change, and a strict word limit of three to six words. Your job is to rewrite the missing chunk so that the new sentence means the same as the original, fits the gap and respects the keyword exactly as printed. What makes this hard is not vocabulary — most candidates know the words. What makes it hard is recognising the grammar family fast enough. CPE recycles a closed set of patterns: causative have/get, reported speech, modals of past deduction, wish / if only, comparative structures, conditional connectors (unless, provided that, otherwise), passive reporting (he is said to have…), inversion after negative adverbials (no sooner had I…), and a handful of fixed phrases with dependent prepositions. If you can name the family in five seconds — 'this is a causative', 'this is past deduction' — the answer almost writes itself. The expensive errors are predictable. Candidates change the keyword ('SUGGEST' becomes 'suggested'). They miss the word count. They paraphrase one half of the sentence and forget the meaning of the other half. They write a sentence that is grammatical but means something slightly different. None of these are listening problems or vocabulary problems. They are routine problems. A 60-second routine — read both sentences, name the pattern, draft, count words, verify meaning, check the keyword is untouched — fixes almost all of them. The deeper payoff is real: paraphrase is the editing skill you use every time you rewrite an email, summarise a meeting or quote a source in an essay. Train it on the page, and you'll use it for life.