This popular series is designed to help improve students' exam performance and increase language competence. Task types familiarise students with the tasks they will face in the exam, further practice and guidance pages build confidence in answering them and an expanded answer key gives clear explanations as to why the given answer is correct.

Hot Spot 5 is primarily a revision course with a strong focus on skills and vocabulary development. The grammar syllabus is predominantly a revision of levels 1-4 but some new (minor) grammar areas will provide opportunities for further vocabulary expansion. Level 5 is aimed at 15-year-olds and will have a much older feel than the previous levels of Hot Spot. Topics will be suited to the 15-year-old and will expand their knowledge of the world. There will be a lot less illustrated artwork and many more photos to appeal to that age range. Hot Spot 5 will also have the following additional features: word power sections comprising word building exercises (eg make and do, verbs with prepositions, collocations with on/get, verb/noun/adjective prefixes and suffixes, etc); an increase in the amount of skills work in all lessons; extra reading sections that will replace the Extra Specials (projects remain in these sections) and will include a variety of genres including stories, non-fiction, poems and plays — these texts will also be recorded; and, exam practice sections in the style of PET as well as some national state exams. Instead of packaging the CD-Rom with the Student's Book, we will be providing an MPO with further exam practice. Please note that the Teacher's Book will not be interleaved with SB pages for level 5 but will still include a Test CD at the back of the book and a photocopiable resources section. In addition to the photocopiables, the Teacher's Book will also contain extra 'grammar lessons' for those classes ready to be introduced to more advanced grammar areas such as present perfect continuous, third conditional.