9/15, which is better than I expected. The strange thing is that a lot of my correct guesses were made on "feel", and whenever I tried to be analytic about the difference between two particular words, I'm almost always wrong.

Rather than worry about all my mistakes, I think I'll just tackle these one at a time. With that in mind, Echo, why is the correct answer to this blank 下?

在真正需要用英语来___国家实力

12/15 in 30 min, missing out on questions 8, 12 (stupid mistakes) and 15 because I thought 手段 was more of a 贬义词.

Incidentally, the question numbers shown on the answer page did not correspond to the actual question numbers on the test. (question 12 was listed as question 2, question 8 as 7, and question 15 as 12.

Finally, question 9 has one too many blank lines (5 blanks, but only 4 words per answer).

Thanks Imron. I guess there's always a first time to have an online test confirm you're an absolute idiot....

Echo - what is the giveaway for Question #5? Does this hinge on the difference between 理解 and 了解? I ruled out 懂得 because 奇怪 seemed wrong, and 领悟 because 梦想 seemed incorrect.

with cheating [a couple times I looked up vocab]:

9/15

;)