Book excerpt: Objective Proficiency contains twenty short units providing a wide range of challenging topics and offering lively yet systematic preparation for the Proficiency exam. Ten lessons focus on the Paper 3 summary task, building up appropriate skills gradually. Authentic language examples taken from the Cambridge International Corpus illustrate a wide range of real English usage. The course is written by experienced examiners who have an in-depth knowledge of the Proficiency exam, and contains material informed by the Cambridge Learner Corpus which shows typical mistakes and areas of difficulty for candidates at Proficiency level.