Respected throughout the world, the highly successful Focus series combines comprehensive exam skills training and enjoyable texts with excellent reference and practice materials.

This workbook is designed to accompany Focus on Advanced English CAE, providing thorough grammar practice, supplementary vocabulary exercises and regular progress tests. The 14 units in the workbook correspond to each unit in the parent text, providing students with further practice in the grammar and vocabulary necessary at this level. The book can also be used as a free standing workbook for anyone preparing for the CAE.

This preparation book for the Cambridge advanced and proficiency exams provides coverage of the structures and vocabulary essential for exam success. Grammar is presented clearly and concisely in each unit with integrated vocabulary content, and varied and challenging exercises.

Six full practice tests plus easy-to-follow expert guidance and exam tips designed to guarantee exam success. The syllabus for this exam has changed and this book has now been replaced by 9781107470262 Advanced Trainer Second edition Six Practice Tests without answers with Audio.

Respected throughout the world, the highly successful Focus series combines comprehensive exam skills training and enjoyable texts with excellent reference and practice materials.

Bestselling author Alain de Botton considers how our private homes and public edifices influence how we feel, and how we could build dwellings in which we would stand a better chance of happiness. In this witty, erudite look at how we shape, and are shaped by, our surroundings, Alain de Botton applies Stendhal’s motto that “Beauty is the promise of happiness” to the spaces we inhabit daily. Why should we pay attention to what architecture has to say to us? de Botton asks provocatively. With his trademark lucidity and humour, de Botton traces how human needs and desires have been served by styles of architecture, from stately Classical to minimalist Modern, arguing that the stylistic choices of a society can represent both its cherished ideals and the qualities it desperately lacks. On an individual level, de Botton has deep sympathy for our need to see our selves reflected in our surroundings; he demonstrates with great wisdom how buildings — just like friends — can serve as guardians of our identity. Worrying about the shape of our sofa or the colour of our walls might seem self-indulgent, but de Botton considers the hopes and fears we have for our homes at a new level of depth and insight. When shopping for furniture or remodelling the kitchen, we don’t just consider functionality but also the major questions of aesthetics and the philosophy of art: What is beauty? Can beautiful surroundings make us good? Can beauty bring happiness? The buildings we find beautiful, de Botton concludes, are those that represent our ideas of a meaningful life. The Architecture of Happiness marks a return to what Alain does best — taking on a subject whose allure is at once tantalizing and a little forbidding and offering to readers a completely beguiling and original exploration of the subject. As he did with Proust, philosophy, and travel, now he does with architecture.