2009 H I G H E R S C H O O L C E R T I F I C AT E E X A M I N AT I O N English (Standard) and English (Advanced) Paper 1 — Area of Study Total marks – 45 Section I Pages 3–8 General Instructions • Reading time – 10 minutes • Working time – 2 hours • Write using black or blue pen 15 marks • Attempt Question 1 • Allow about 40 minutes for this section Section II Page 9 15 marks • Attempt Question 2 • Allow about 40 minutes for this section Section III Pages 10–11 15 marks • Attempt Question 3 • Allow about 40 minutes for this section 151 BLANK PAGE – 2 – Section I 5 marks Attempt Question 1 Allow about 40 minutes for this section Answer the question in a writing booklet. Extra writing booklets are available. In your answers you will be assessed on how well you: demonstrate understanding of the way perceptions of belonging are shaped in and through texts describe, explain and analyse the relationship between language, text and context Question 1 (15 marks) Examine Texts one, two, three and four carefully and then answer the questions on page 8. Text one — Visual text Awaiting copyright Question 1 continues on page 4 –3–
Question 1 (continued) Text two — Poem Awaiting copyright Question 1 continues on page 5 –4– Question 1 (continued) Text three — Prose extract – The Chosen by David Ireland She began to love the silence, which clever people tell us is the absence of ritual. Though in those hills it was more. It was tense silence, there was a buzzing of unseen movement. There were small waterfalls flowing with fish, with no water sound, only fish . . . She watched the retreating backs of showers as they climbed the next hill. She listened to see if she could hear the crops growing . . She was a different person . . . She began to see the soil differently . . . She imagined the thin topsoil digesting her thoughts as they fell from her head. She found herself thinking people were ugly and they’d made the world sad. Once or twice she looked over the high fence of the kindergarten feeling she’d like to have been a teacher of little kids. She was emptying of one life, filling with another. More than anything else she loved to be alone with fields of grass and go up into the belts of trees that crowned all the ridges, to search out secret places.
Once she climbed a steep hill and between two trees discovered a green landscape she hadn’t known existed . . . She would lie out in the open like a patient gazing upwards at the blue ceiling, fall asleep, and wake to a sky full of grand canyons and mountain ranges of white cloud . . . She imagined she could lift her hand, hold it over blue peaks, valleys, ranges, touching them gently, feeling their folds, textures, warmths and sudden coolness with her fingers and her palm, which was big as a shire.
Once she stayed out all night and saw at dawn a stand of white-barked gums wet with light, and shivered, while around her the silence and stillness rang with invisible bells. Sunsets entranced her. She walked straight towards them, large vague symphonies of colour, eyes open, trying to enter the radiance . . . Gradually her feelings approached the commitment of words . . . a kind of in-breathing, perhaps, the basic taste and sound of the world entering into her and feeling at home, making her feel at home among the hills and sunsets; at home in the landscape which she felt she put on like an overcoat, which fitted.
At home among the leaves of trees touching high overhead, speaking quietly to each other and silently with her . . . . . . Indoors, the windows were too full of cloud, too little sky . . . Often she stared up into the sky trying to get past the blue, and it seemed the whole sky suddenly swooped down with big blue arms to pick her up and take her to a place of music in words and pictures. Other times, she tried to read the answer in the writings on the scribbly gums. She wanted to know . . . From The Chosen One by David Ireland.
Published in 1997. Reprinted by permission of Random House Australia. Question 1 continues on page 6 –5– Question 1 (continued) Text four — Nonfiction extract – Home: The Heart of the Matter by Peter Read Homes, like other places, are mentally constructed. What we identify as ‘home’ is not only a different location from everyone else’s, it occupies a different space. Home can be an area as big as half of Sydney: Dad knew the city tracks. Not just the steps and pathways round the Cross, for example, but he had a mental picture like a map.
The shortcuts all the way from the coast to Parramatta which makes me think of Sydney as like a middle-eastern city, multi-layered and only readily knowable by people with that ancient knowledge. Home can be the inner city: But still the centre of gravity is the inner city, and oddly enough it is here, in my corner house, with traffic on two sides of me, that I’ve begun to learn how to be still, and to accept that changes can come in small and undramatic ways. Home can be a suburb: It’s me. Footscray is me. I know I’m happier here than I’ve been for years . . I felt as if I’ve come home . . . I like it very much, I do, and I won’t be leaving here. Home can be a house: Well, it may sound a bit corny, but to put it this way, when Helen and I went down to our place in Cherwell fifty-odd years ago, I thought that was the loveliest place that anybody could ever have. It was a nice brick home that I had and I think home is everything; you’ve got to put a lot into it and you get a heck of a lot out of it. Home can be a room in a house: [When someone was in the kitchen] it kept the family in contact throughout the day.
When they’re home, everybody knows where to find other people, or at least to find Mum and Dad or whoever’s doing the cooking — there’s usually somebody in the kitchen. Question 1 continues on page 7 –6– Question 1 (continued) Text four — Nonfiction extract (continued) Awaiting copyright Question 1 continues on page 8 –7– In your answers you will be assessed on how well you: ¦ demonstrate understanding of the way perceptions of belonging are shaped in and through texts ¦ describe, explain and analyse the relationship between language, text and context
Question 1 (continued) Text one — Visual text (a) Explain how ONE aspect of the visual text represents the concept of belonging. 2 Text two — Poem (b) Why does the speaker say ‘we never belonged’ (line 11)? 2 Text three — Prose extract (c) How does the narrator evoke the experience of being at home in the landscape? 3 Text four — Nonfiction extract (d) Analyse the ways this text communicates the relationship between home and belonging. 3 Texts one, two, three and four — Visual text, Poem, Prose extract and Nonfiction extract (e) In each of these texts, perceptions of belonging involve connections between people and places.
Select any TWO of these texts and compare their portrayal of the connections between people and places. 5 End of Question 1 – 8 – Section II 15 marks Attempt Question 2 Allow about 40 minutes for this section Answer the question in a SEPARATE writing booklet. Extra writing booklets are available. In your answer you will be assessed on how well you: ¦ express understanding of belonging in the context of your studies ¦ organise, develop and express ideas using language appropriate to audience, purpose and context
Question 2 (15 marks) “Human beings, like plants, grow in the soil of acceptance, not in the atmosphere of rejection. ” “When someone prizes us just as we are, he or she confirms our existence. ” Drawing on the ideas in ONE of these quotations, write an imaginative piece that celebrates the ways relationships contribute to a sense of belonging. – 9 – Section III 15 marks Attempt Question 3 Allow about 40 minutes for this section Answer the question in a SEPARATE writing booklet. Extra writing booklets are available.
In your answer you will be assessed on how well you: ¦ demonstrate understanding of the concept of belonging in the context of your study ¦ analyse, explain and assess the ways belonging is represented in a variety of texts ¦ organise, develop and express ideas using language appropriate to audience, purpose and context Question 3 (15 marks) Understanding nourishes belonging . . . a lack of understanding prevents it. Demonstrate how your prescribed text and ONE other related text of your own choosing represent this interpretation of belonging.
The prescribed texts are listed on the next page. Question 3 continues on page 11 – 10 – Question 3 (continued) The prescribed texts are: • Prose Fiction – Amy Tan, The Joy Luck Club – Jhumpa Lahiri, The Namesake – Charles Dickens, Great Expectations – Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Heat and Dust – Tara June Winch, Swallow the Air • Nonfiction • Drama – Raimond Gaita, Romulus, My Father – Arthur Miller, The Crucible: A Play in Four Acts – Jane Harrison, Rainbow’s End from Vivienne Cleven et al. eds), Contemporary Indigenous Plays • Film – Baz Luhrmann, Strictly Ballroom – Rolf De Heer, Ten Canoes • Shakespeare • Poetry – William Shakespeare, As You Like It – Peter Skrzynecki, Immigrant Chronicle * Feliks Skrzynecki * St Patrick’s College * Ancestors * 10 Mary Street * Migrant Hostel * Post card * In the Folk Museum – Emily Dickinson, Selected Poems of Emily Dickinson * 66 This is my letter to the world * 67 I died for beauty but was scarce * 82 I had been hungry all the years * 83 I gave myself to him * 127 A narrow fellow in the grass * 154 A word dropped careless on the page * 161 What mystery pervades a well! 181 Saddest noise, the sweetest noise – Steven Herrick, The Simple Gift End of paper – 11 – BLANK PAGE – 12 – © Board of Studies NSW 2009
