Total marks: 80 · Duration: 1 hour 45 minutes
Instructions to candidates
• Answer all questions in both Section A and Section B. • You must have the Insert for Section A. Write your answers in this answer booklet. • You are advised to spend about 15 minutes reading through the source and all five questions you have to answer. • You are advised to spend about 45 minutes on Section A and about 45 minutes on Section B. • The maximum mark for this paper is 80. • There are 40 marks for Section A and 40 marks for Section B. • The source was written for this practice paper. It is not taken from a published novel.
Paper
Section A: Reading (40 marks)
Read again the first part of the Source from lines 1 to 8.
Question 1
List four things from this part of the source about the night market. (4 marks)
Question 2
Look in detail at this extract from lines 24 to 32 of the source:
[See lines 24–32 in the Insert]
How does the writer use language here to describe the moment the lights go out?
You could include the writer's choice of: • words and phrases • language features and techniques • sentence forms.
(8 marks)
Question 3
You now need to think about the whole of the source.
This text is from the opening of a novel.
How has the writer structured the text to interest you as a reader?
You could write about: • what the writer focuses your attention on at the beginning • how and why the writer changes this focus as the source develops • any other structural features that interest you.
(8 marks)
Question 4
Focus this part of your answer on the second part of the source, from line 23 to the end.
A student, having read this section of the text, said: "In this part of the story, Priya changes from a bored, reluctant helper into someone brave who takes control. The writer makes you admire her."
To what extent do you agree?
In your response, you could: • consider your own impressions of Priya • evaluate how the writer presents the change in Priya • support your response with references to the text.
(20 marks)
Section B: Writing (40 marks)
You are advised to spend about 45 minutes on this section.
Write in full sentences.
You are reminded of the need to plan your answer.
You should leave enough time to check your work at the end.
Question 5
Your school is creating an anthology of descriptive and narrative writing called After Dark.
Either:
Write a description of a busy outdoor food market at night, suggested by this scene:
Strings of bulbs hang between the stalls. Steam rises from a grill in the foreground, where a vendor's face is lit orange from below. Behind him, figures crowd between the stalls, and the sky above the buildings is a deep blue.
Or:
Write the opening part of a story about a moment when everything went dark.
(24 marks for content and organisation
16 marks for technical accuracy)
[40 marks]
Insert for Section A
Source — 21st Century fiction (written for this practice paper)
This extract is from the opening of a novel. Priya, aged fifteen, is helping her aunt on a fruit stall at a city night market.
1 By nine o'clock the car park behind the cinema had stopped being a car park.
2 Where the white bays had been there were now forty stalls under striped awnings,
3 strung together with cables and fairy lights that sagged like washing lines,
4 and the air had turned thick and sweet with frying onions, charcoal and sugar.
5 Priya stood behind Auntie Meena's fruit stall and counted mangoes she had already counted.
6 Twenty-two. Twenty-two again. She had been here since six, and her feet ached,
7 and the girl from the bubble-tea van opposite had laughed at her apron twice.
8 Somewhere a speaker was playing the same four songs on a loop.
9 Auntie Meena, of course, was enjoying herself. She enjoyed everything loudly.
10 'Best lychees in the city!' she called, though they were the only lychees in the city,
11 or at least the only ones in the car park. She held one up between finger and thumb
12 as if it were a pearl, peeled it in a single spiral and pressed it, wet and gleaming,
13 into the palm of a startled man in a suit. He bought two boxes. They always did.
14 Priya watched the crowd move past in slow currents: couples sharing paper cones of chips,
15 an old man in slippers who came every Friday and bought nothing, children weaving
16 between legs with glowing wands that their parents would regret by Sunday.
17 Above it all the lights swung gently in the wind, and the sky behind them
18 was the dull orange of a city that never quite managed to be dark.
19 'Smile,' said Auntie Meena, without looking at her. 'Nobody buys from a cloud.'
20 Priya smiled at nobody in particular. She thought about her phone, face down
21 in the cash tin, and the messages she was missing. She thought about anything
22 except the next three hours.
23 That was when the lights went out.
24 It did not happen gradually. One moment the market was a long, bright throat of noise;
25 the next it was swallowed whole. The fairy lights died, the speakers choked mid-song,
26 the neon sign above the bubble-tea van flickered once, like a blink, and was gone.
27 For a single second there was absolute silence, as if the whole car park had breathed in.
28 Then the sound came back in a rush – a gasp, a scream that turned into a laugh,
29 someone swearing, the clatter of a dropped tray, and under it all the rising mutter
30 of three hundred people deciding at once whether to be frightened.
31 Phone torches bloomed across the dark, small and white and frantic,
32 sweeping over faces and awnings and the bare black bones of the stalls.
33 Auntie Meena's hand found Priya's arm and gripped it. 'Cash tin,' she whispered.
34 Priya reached for it, and that was when she saw him.
35 He was standing perfectly still in the middle of the aisle while the crowd pushed around him,
36 a boy of three or four in a dinosaur jumper, one sock pulled up and one sock down.
37 He was not crying. That was what frightened her. He was looking up at the dead lights
38 with his mouth slightly open, as if he were waiting for someone to switch them back on,
39 and nobody – not one person in that whole shoving, flashing, muttering crowd – was looking at him.
40 'Priya,' said her aunt. 'The tin.'
41 Priya put the tin into her aunt's hands. Then she lifted the flap of the stall
42 and stepped out into the dark.
43 The crowd closed around her like water. Elbows, shoulders, a bag swinging into her ribs.
44 She lost sight of the dinosaur jumper, found it, lost it again.
45 Somewhere behind her, the generator coughed, and coughed, and did not start.