There's no need for the swagger. Level four on the new HSK test might be more than halfway up the exam's new difficulty curve, but it only maps to the beginning level on the older test in terms of difficulty. This means it is suitable for students who have done about a year of serious fulltime study of the Chinese language. Anything less and you can expect to have difficulty getting through the material.

If you've already spent some time learning mandarin you should find the test relatively straightforward though. In each of the fifteen practice HSK questions included in this sample exam, our question consist of a sentence which is missing a single word. Your challenge is to pick the only word from the options given which completes the statement in a grammatically sensible way. And you need to do this all fairly quickly. In a real exam environment you would have a maximum of 45 seconds per question.