Today's sample HSK test is a positioning exercise. We haven't had one of these in a while, so here's the drill: each question is a sentence missing a single word. Your challenge is to figure out where the word fits in the sentence in question. This is as easy as A,B,C....

The nice thing about these exercises (and the reason we don't throw them at you terribly often) is that they test a relatively narrow spectrum of knowledge. Still, there's a lot of variance in how well people do depending on their comfort with Chinese grammar. In most cases, we hope that the correct answer should be obvious, even if you finally settle on it because the other answers simply feel wrong.