[KaiserPro]

I agree with the others

But the choice of "advanced words" seems a bit odd. Obscure, isnt that obscure.

Sure there are some speciality words, but most of these words are just the stuff you're gonna hear on radio4 in normal conversation

[estebarb]

I had that discussion with my high school English teacher. We used USA oriented books and they often introduce "advanced vocabulary" which should have been trivial for Spanish speakers, or any latin language speaker for the matter.

I suppose they evaluate difficulty based on origin of the word. If you already know German or Spanish you may have a head start when learning English, but on a different subset of it.