A review of Keynote Advanced student’s book

The Keynote Advanced student’s book is an innovative book that explains a lot of aspects of C1 level in collaboration with TED talks. Every unit starts with a relevant TED talk. These talks are especially well selected because they tackle important current topics and others which are motivational and important to improve ourselves as learners.

On the hand, the thing I liked the most about the book that was watching some TED talk’s videos and working them with all the exercises. Some of them were really interesting. I find the book good to improve the listening part and the vocabulary. On the other hand, there were other videos really hard for me and I didn’t understand them so much. Consequently, the exercises were difficult too.

Regarding the main weaknesses of the book, in my opinion it`s not focus on reading and writing parts. Then, if we want to prepare an official exam it is better to look for exercises in other books. Maybe, I would expect more explanations of grammar points.

To recommend a book it would depend on the goals of the course and every student. For example, nowadays I have the goal of passing the exam Cambridge in Advanced in English so I would like to have a book to prepare all of the parts or most of them, if it is possible. Otherwise, I find this book pretty acceptable.

To sum up, overall I give three out of five star rating only due to this downside. If the book were more focus on preparing the C1 exam, I would rate it with five out of five!

Juan Antonio Corbalán Liarte

This article was written for the English course (C1) at the «Universidad Autónoma de Madrid».