The HSK shuffled its feet, shame coloring its face as it recalled its recent humiliation on the TOEFL exam. Out of more than a hundred questions covering grammar, vocabulary and word-choice, the Chinese proficiency test had managed to answer a mere ten correctly, and those purely by accident. "Don't worry about English so much," one of its friends had said in condolence. "Everyone knows you're the gold standard when it comes to fluency in Chinese."

Our sample HSK exam for today is an Advanced Reading test. These passages are not necessarily a level-of-magnitude more challenging than those at the Intermediate level, but the passages are longer and trickier. Meanwhile, you still have only forty-five questions to answer every question. So take this sample test and see how you do. If you can routinely answer over twelve correctly, you are ready for the Advanced HSK.