B2 English Grammar

B2 grammar exercises

Every lesson marked above also has its own practice set: 14 sets of 60 exercises — 280 multiple-choice questions, 280 fill-in-the-blank and 280 sentence-building tasks in total. Each one is marked as you answer, keeps your score, and works without an account.

What you can do with B2 English

The Common European Framework describes B2 as the level at which a learner can handle the following. Each grammar topic below feeds directly into one or more of them.

• interact with fluency and spontaneity with native speakers

• produce clear, detailed text on a wide range of subjects

• explain a viewpoint on a topical issue, weighing advantages and disadvantages

• understand the main ideas of complex text on both concrete and abstract topics

What order to study B2 grammar in

At B2 you are refining rather than acquiring. Prioritise the structures that carry register — inversion, advanced conditionals, the reporting passive — because they are what separate accurate English from persuasive English. Work through the modal perfects carefully; deduction about the past is heavily tested and frequently avoided by learners who could use it.

The mistakes that mark a B2 learner

These five come up more often than everything else combined at this level. None of them stops you being understood, which is precisely why they survive so long — nobody corrects them in conversation.

• ✗ If I would have known, I would have called. ✓ If I had known, I would have called.

  The third conditional puts the past perfect after if and would have in the result. Would never appears in the if clause, however common the error is in speech.

• ✗ I wish I would have more time. ✓ I wish I had more time.

  Wish about the present takes the past simple; wish about the past takes the past perfect. Would after wish only works for irritating habits or requests: I wish he would stop.

• ✗ Never I have seen such a thing. ✓ Never have I seen such a thing.

  A negative adverb at the front of a clause forces inversion of subject and auxiliary. This is a genuinely B2 structure and appears constantly in formal writing and in dramatic speech.

• ✗ The building is being renovated since March. ✓ The building has been being renovated since March — or better: work has been going on since March.

  The present perfect continuous passive is grammatically possible but so clumsy that English avoids it. Recognising when a correct structure is still the wrong choice is a B2 skill.

• ✗ He denied to take the money. ✓ He denied taking the money.

  Deny, admit, avoid and risk take the -ing form; refuse, agree and promise take the infinitive. At B2 the expectation is that you know these lists rather than guessing.

How to know you have really reached B2

B2 is secure when your grammar stops being the thing a reader notices. The structures at this level — inversion, the perfect modals, hypothetical wishes, advanced passives — are less about being understood than about controlling register, so the real test is whether you can say the same thing three ways and choose the right one for the situation. A good check: write a formal complaint, then rewrite it as a message to a friend. If the second version is not just simpler but structurally different, you have the range B2 describes.

B2 English grammar: frequently asked questions