Any tips on how to approach a complex, narrative, open cloze test?

This one task seems to be quite an unbreakable barrier for me, even though I have built up a considerable amount of vocabulary to help me handle it. No matter how I try to approach it however, I always get about half of the answers wrong. Any piece of advice would be greatly appreciated.

Example of such task is in the attachment below. (Source: 2nd stage of a national English competition in my country, 2015)

Thank you.

Why don't you tell us what your answers are? (You'll need to type out the entire piece, including your suggestions for what goes in each blank space.) If you've already got half of them right, it would be a waste of time for us to tell you those answers. Type it out, with your suggestion in bold in each space, and we'll have a look.

What are the rules for this task and do they allow multiple answers? I am not sure why some gaps have letters and others are blank. I am not sure that many native speakers would get #5 right.

Here's one simple piece of advice: build up your vocabulary even more.

This is a very hard exercise, so don't be disheartened by a 50% success rate. The exercise is deliberately designed to be hard, and it's an extremely hard thing to design, which means that any deficiency will often be with the question itself rather than with your knowledge.

Tdol said:

What are the rules for this task and do they allow multiple answers?

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You simply have to fill the gaps with the target words. The idea is that there's just one 'correct' word for each gap, which is the word used in the original text.

I am not sure why some gaps have letters and others are blank.

Click to expand...

Giving key letters in some of the words has two goals: a) to elicit the correct answer where there may be multiple equally possible answers; b) to make the question less difficult.

I should have probably mentioned, that although the original missing words are preferred, filling the gaps with other words, (as long as they make the story logical and cohesive) is still allowed. Which is why I find my 50% score to be prety terrible. I just seem to be lacking the proper technique to approach this, I've tried looking for collocations, translating and retranslating but it's not getting any easier.

Are you going to show us your attempt(s)?