"Are you sure these are beginner questions," John asked timidly, his ego bruised from its severe tutoring moments earlier. Gail answered with a soft cackle. Her voice came out muffled, emerging from deep within the fog-wreathed corner of our office she had converted into her HSK Fortress of Doom. "I'm just not sure a beginner is really going to need to know 不鄙视."

At the opposite end of our office, Echo and the rest of the team were holding an impromptu party in the recording studio. "The questions are a bit tough," she admitted over the steady beat of the Bossa nova. "But the words we're testing for are still fairly basic. So even if people don't know what some of the answers mean, they should be able to guess the correct one." Another burst of cackling emerged from Gail's shrouded domain. "That's the idea at least," Echo added. "The HSK is difficult though, people can't expect the multiple choice section to be nothing but hello and goodbye."