2019

TRIAL HSC
EXAMINATION PAPER

English Advanced
Paper 1 – Texts and Human Experiences

General Instructions Total Marks – 40

 Reading Time – 10 minutes
Section I pages 2 - 9
 Working Time – 1 hour and 30
minutes 20 marks
 Write using black or blue pen  Attempt Question 1
 Allow about 45 minutes for this section

Section II page 10
20 marks
 Attempt Question 2
 Allow about 45 minutes for this section

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Section I
20 marks
Attempt Question 1
Allow about 45 minutes for this section
Examine Texts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 carefully and then answer the questions on page 9 on the writing paper
provided.

In your answers you will be assessed on how well you:

 demonstrate understanding of human experiences in texts
 analyse, explain and assess the ways human experiences are represented in texts

Question 1 (20 marks)

Text 1 – Magazine Cover ‘The New Yorker’

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Text 2 – Feature Article “A bee sting, my mother and my need to be touched” by Lea Antigny

I recently decided to start a flower diary. The diary would be weekly entries inspired by a shrub or flower or even
weed I had noticed that week. It was intended as a way of encouraging myself to pay attention – not just to the things
around me but to pay attention to the way I pay attention at all. As well as noticing the plants themselves, I’ve noticed
something else. An impulse to narrativise everything.

Walking along the Newcastle shoreline, I noticed bees hovering over the coastal shrubbery. They were hypnotic to
watch. I could stand in front of them for half an hour before realising my eyes had gone out of focus. It reminded me
of the bee sting I made happen as a child.

I’ve told the story of this particular sting a few times. Sometimes I say I did it on purpose. Sometimes I say I was only
setting the scene and, putting on a convincing show, was stung by accident. By now I’ve retrofitted so much meaning
to the whole act that I can’t be sure which is true. When told out loud it is usually for comedic effect. In telling it, I’m
self-deprecating about the fact that I’m needy, that I can’t be alone. That I’m an attention-seeker. Instead of trying to
hide these things, I pre-empt them. I get ahead of them with a joke. Isn’t it funny how I need to be touched? Isn’t it
silly?

My father once said “you’re just like a dog! You need constant patting”. I was curled up in his lap and had instructed
him, as I so often would, to “trace on my back”. Whenever his arm would grow tired and his hand fall away, I would
shrug my shoulder or make a small murmur. Keep going.

This much of the story is true – my constant need for touch. Once, at the end of an especially draining work trip, I
rolled my suitcase into the MAC store at Auckland’s international airport. “I’ve got these dark circles under my eyes,”
I told the shop assistant. She showed me a concealer and offered to demonstrate, as I had hoped she would. After the
strangeness of the hyper-social and incredibly lonely week on tour, that first stroke of the soft brush on my face felt
like I was cracking a crème brûlée. I closed my eyes and felt every slight touch, willing it to go on forever. I left with
three products I couldn’t afford.

On the afternoon of the sting, when I was about six years old – even my age at which it happened is a wild guess – I
wanted to stroke my mother’s hair. Just to reach out and touch. She was busy at the time and kept swatting me away.
I’d been wondering what would get her attention. If I was hurt – for example, if I had been stung by a bee – surely, she
would have to let me.

So I sat, cross-legged and determined, in the white clover in our front yard. I watched as the bees moved from flower
to flower in fits and starts. The clover was the kind from which we would make daisy-chains at lunch. Picking a thin
stem at its base, pressing the crescent moon of my thumbnail into the fleshy green until the skin on either side
snapped, threading a new stem into the fresh wound, joining clover to clover, end to end, till they were strung
together, holding each other in their new mouths. Like tiny cannibals.

I watched the clover as they bent and bounced back under the weight of the bees, drifting slow and lazy, landing and
taking off with the lightest touch. I reached out with my right hand and purposefully swept my needy fingers through
the clover, disrupting the bee’s path, until I felt the sting. At that moment, the foolishness of the whole exercise
became clear. I ran inside and cried out for her, and it worked, of course. I curled into her, gripped her hair, and cried.
My face was hot with shame.

The story is only ever weighted with meaning if I choose to tell it a certain way. If I choose not to play it for comedic
effect. Sometimes I tell it as though when I was six, I already knew that my years of physical intimacy with her would
be cut short. It’s not that poignant, really.

It is funny to call them daisy-chains, I’ve never made one from real daisies. We didn’t have daisies in our yard. We
did have dandelions, which I thought were flowers, planted intentionally, until one day my grandmother told me they
were weeds. I used to think the same of lantana. Sweet pink and yellow candy-like flowers. Once, visiting a friend’s
property, her parents chastised me as I marvelled at the toxic plant. “It’s everywhere,” her mother frowned. “It’s
choking the earth.”

It’s easy to tell the story of the sting as though it’s about anything other than a child not yet able to express herself and
needing a little too much. It’s easy to think the white clover is anything other than grass.

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Text 3 – Fiction extract “The Namesake” by Jhumpa Lahiri

“Come in!” he hollers, expecting it to be Sonia in her pajamas, asking if she can borrow his Rubik’s Cube.
He is surprised to see his father, standing there in stocking feet, a small potbelly visible beneath his oat-
colored sweater vest, his mustache turning gray. Gogol is especially surprised to see a gift in his father’s
hands. His father has never given him birthday presents apart from whatever his mother buys, but this year,
his father says, walking across the room to where Gogol is sitting, he has something special. The gift is
covered in red-and-green-and-gold-striped paper left over from Christmas the year before, taped awkwardly
at the seams. It is obviously a book, thick, hardcover, wrapped by his father’s own hands. Gogol lifts the
paper slowly, but in spite of this the tape leaves a scab. “The Short Stories of Nikolai Gogol,” the jacket
says. Inside, the price has been snipped away on the diagonal.

“I ordered it from the bookstore, just for you,” his father says, his voice raised in order to be heard over the
music. “It’s difficult to find in hardcover these days. I hope you like it.”

Gogol leans over toward the stereo to turn the volume down a bit. He would have preferred “The
Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy,” or even another copy of “The Hobbit” to replace the one he lost last
summer in Calcutta, left on the rooftop of his father’s house in Alipore and snatched away by crows. In spite
of his father’s occasional suggestions, he has never been inspired to read a word of Gogol, or of any Russian
writer, for that matter. He has never been told why he was really named Gogol. He thinks his father’s limp is
the consequence of an injury playing soccer in his teens.

“Thanks, Baba,” Gogol says, eager to return to his lyrics. Lately he’s been lazy, addressing his parents in
English, though they continue to speak to him in Bengali.

His father is still standing there in his room, watching expectantly, his hands clasped together behind his
back, so Gogol flips through the book. A single picture at the front, on smoother paper than the rest of the
pages, shows a pencil drawing of the author, sporting a velvet jacket, a billowy white shirt, and a cravat. The
face is foxlike, with small, dark eyes, a thin, neat mustache, an extremely large pointy nose. Dark hair slants
steeply across his forehead and is plastered to either side of his head, and there is a disturbing, vaguely
supercilious smile set into long, narrow lips. Gogol Ganguli is relieved to see no resemblance.

For by now he’s come to hate questions pertaining to his name, hates having constantly to explain. He hates
having to tell people that it doesn’t mean anything “in Indian.” He hates having to wear a nametag on his
sweater at Model United Nations Day at school. He hates that his name is both absurd and obscure, that it
has nothing to do with who he is, that it is neither Indian nor American but, of all things, Russian. He hates
having to live with it, with a pet name turned good name, day after day, second after second. He hates seeing
it on the brown-paper sleeve of the National Geographic subscription his parents got him for his birthday
the year before, and seeing it perpetually listed in the high honor roll printed in the town’s newspaper. At
times his name, an entity shapeless and weightless, manages nevertheless to distress him physically, like the
scratchy tag of a shirt he has been forced permanently to wear. At times he wishes he could disguise it,
shorten it somehow, the way the other Indian boy in his school, Jayadev, had got people to call him Jay. But
Gogol, already short and catchy, resists mutation. Other boys his age have begun to court girls already,
asking them to go to the movies or the pizza parlor, but he cannot imagine saying, “Hi, it’s Gogol” under
potentially romantic circumstances. He cannot imagine this at all.

From the little he knows about Russian writers, it dismays him that his parents chose the weirdest namesake.
Leo or Anton, he could have lived with. Alexander, shortened to Alex, he would have greatly preferred. But
Gogol sounds ludicrous to his ears, lacking dignity or gravity. What dismays him most is the irrelevance of
it all. Gogol, he’s been tempted to tell his father on more than one occasion, was his father’s favorite author,
not his. Then again, it’s his own fault. He could have been known, at school at least, as Nikhil. That one day,
his first day of kindergarten, which he no longer remembers, could have changed everything.

“Thanks again,” Gogol tells his father now. He shuts the cover and swings his legs over the edge of the bed,
to put the book away on his shelves. But his father takes the opportunity to sit beside him on the bed. For a
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moment he rests a hand on Gogol’s shoulder. The boy’s body, in recent months, has grown tall, nearly as tall
as Ashoke’s. The childhood pudginess has vanished from his face. The voice has begun to deepen, is slightly
husky now. It occurs to Ashoke that he and his son probably wear the same size shoe. In the glow of the
bedside lamp, Ashoke notices a scattered down emerging on his son’s upper lip. An Adam’s apple is
prominent on his neck. The pale hands, like Ashima’s, are long and thin. He wonders how closely Gogol
resembles him at this age. But there are no photographs to document Ashoke’s childhood; not until his
passport, not until his life in America, does visual documentation exist. On the night table Ashoke sees a can
of deodorant, a tube of Clearasil. He lifts the book from where it lies on the bed between them, running a
hand protectively over the cover. “I took the liberty of reading it first. It has been many years since I have
read these stories. I hope you don’t mind.”

“No problem,” Gogol says.

“I feel a special kinship with Gogol,” Ashoke says, “more than with any other writer. Do you know why?”

“You like his stories.”

“Apart from that. He spent most of his adult life outside his homeland. Like me.”

Gogol nods. “Right.”

“And there is another reason.” The music ends and there is silence. But then Gogol flips the record, turning
the volume up on “Revolution 1.”

“What’s that?” Gogol says, a bit impatiently.

Ashoke looks around the room. He notices the Lennon obituary pinned to the bulletin board, and then a
cassette of classical Indian music he’d bought for Gogol months ago, after a concert at Kresge, still sealed in
its wrapper. He sees the pile of birthday cards scattered on the carpet, and remembers a hot August day
fourteen years ago in Cambridge when he held his son for the first time. Ever since that day, the day he
became a father, the memory of his accident has receded, diminishing over the years. Though he will never
forget that night, it no longer lurks persistently in his mind, stalking him in the same way. Instead, it is
affixed firmly to a distant time, to a place far from Pemberton Road. Today, his son’s birthday, is a day to
honor life, not brushes with death. And so, for now, Ashoke decides to keep the explanation of his son’s
name to himself.

“No other reason. Good night,” he says to Gogol, getting up from the bed. At the door he pauses, turns
around. “Do you know what Dostoyevsky once said?”

Gogol shakes his head.

“ ‘We all came out of Gogol’s overcoat.’ ”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It will make sense to you one day. Many happy returns of the day.”

Gogol gets up and shuts the door behind his father, who has the annoying habit of always leaving it partly
open. He turns the lock on the knob for good measure, then wedges the book on a high shelf between two
volumes of the Hardy Boys. He settles down again with his lyrics on the bed when something occurs to him.
This writer he is named after—Gogol isn’t his first name. His first name is Nikolai. Not only does Gogol
Ganguli have a pet name turned good name but a last name turned first name. And so it occurs to him that
no one he knows in the world, in Russia or India or America or anywhere, shares his name. Not even the
source of his namesake.

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Text 4 – Poem “The Lighthouse” by Ahmad Al Rady

When I was a child I dreamt of being a pirate

so with pockets full of prayers
a throat full of questions
I set sail,
into the obese ocean
a typewriter for a boat
one eye shut two palms open
the moon took the sunset out of my rise
swooned into existence
the night was still
yet still
stood loud and empty
like 10pm arguments over brushing your teeth and going to bed on time
that keep you up all night-
there I stood on the wisest corner of the earth
right where the ocean ends and the mighty waves burst into
the violet sunrise and set like a lullaby
I saw a man.
He was a thousand years tall,
had one eye,
a flashlight for a voice
they called him 'The Lighthouse'
he neighboured the stars yet felt still ...felt alone.
I have never seen a bruised or a broken heart
But I have seen way too many battles won by blindfolded wrists
who refused to let go, refused to give up on
arms that didn't want to be held
by hands that needed them to hold on ...when all the light went away.
He
told me a story a story...of the flame tree.
Once upon somewhere
the Sun was selfish - holding out for light
a flame tree grew on the edge of the sea
she stood ancient and stubborn with dried roots and
bare branches barely decorated by crimson leaves
which held on like a kindergarten promise
you forgot you once made
yet she was afraid
she was afraid she would suffocate under all that darkness
And so she turned to the ocean
and noticed
the only beacon of light in sight was that of the lighthouse
and so she sent leaves in the wind,
she sent leaves in the wind,
as kisses -to get his attention
and…she did
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undressed her ego...
and felt light...
she felt light…the actual particles of light
shone bright upon her
she felt warm
royal and vibrant like the morning calls of a lyrebird
she felt home
Though not before long
Autumn came swooping on in
and collected all her leaves and held them
behind his back close fisted
like a Frank Warren post secret
The lighthouse didn't speak the language of seasons
and thought the flame tree
didn't want to his attention no more
And so he turned off his light and found comfort in loneliness
Spring skipped and sang ever so loudly
awakening the flame tree from her sleep
She
realised
her lighthouse was gone
her mouth,
was a temple -with every syllable she cried baptised her lungs
her pleads shrieked shrines and echoed like sin yet stood proud as forgiveness!
Her soul sulked till her crimson limbs hummed hymns in unison
prostrated the earth,
as the gargoyle of constellations wrapped the sky around her shoulders...
for the West Wind was swift that night.
Her ribs dried up, and ancient like a thousand coast lines
Her... spirit is a
thousand folk tales now.
And every now and then....
I see a leaf in the wind.
I see a leaf...in the wind...
Frank Warren post secret – impulsive
art posted anonymously to a specific
community that reveals something
about the sender.

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Text 5 – Fiction “There and Then” by Michael Brennan

Friends in a field, their shadows running long into the untilled ground, and I’m busy trying to catch up, calling
for them to hold on a moment, the voice unfamiliar and the words not my own, and when I wake I realize the
last thing I called to them might have been the name of the town we were all looking for, but now it’s a summer
morning, the light coming in urgent with day, sheets strewn at the end of the bed, and by the time my mind
reaches out for it, that name or word or thought, it’s gone, perhaps lying there up ahead, with them in the town
beyond the old shed at the edge of the field, with its collection of discarded tools, hoes and picks and shovels
still caked in loam and soil, the old two-furrow plough and an empty feedbag. There’s a persimmon tree, with
its thin covering of leaves and its branches weighed by tightly packed, hard orange orbs, dense and ripening,
and a thicket of rosemary sprawling about in the autumn sun, gone wild, looking like it might take over the
world with its thick rough tines, the heavy scent that rubs off onto skin and lasts all day even after you wake.
But thinking of that town my friends have gone on to, looking out the window at the summer light, the raging
open blue of the sky outside, I cross past the old shed to where the harrowed ground forms the first hint of a
path between the cherry trees lining the field, to where a pair of jackdaws come in from the north, creamy
white throats quiet as the flat slate sky above, flit between some memory of spring, the one gone or the one
up ahead.

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Section I
Question 1 (20 marks)

Examine Texts 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 carefully and then answer the questions below.

In your answers you will be assessed on how well you:

 demonstrate an understanding of the way perceptions of discovery are shaped in and
through texts
 describe, explain and analyse the relationship between language, text and context

Text 1 — Magazine cover

(a) How does the magazine cover covey a sense of shared human experience?
(3 marks)

Text 2 — Article

(b) Explain how the writer’s use of language expresses how a childhood experience informs a sense of
personal reflection.
(4 marks)

Text 3 — Fiction Extract

(c) Explain how different aspects of the protagonist’s family experience are represented in the extract.

(6 marks)

Text 4 and Text 5 – Poem and Fiction Extract

(d) Compare how Text 4 and Text 5 explore the significance of storytelling and memory as elements of
the human experience.
(7 marks)

END OF SECTION I

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 Section II
20 marks
Attempt Question 2
Allow about 45 minutes for this section

In your answers you will be assessed on how well you:

- demonstrate understanding of human experiences in texts
- analyse, explain and assess the ways human experiences are represented in texts
- organise, develop and express ideas using language appropriate to audience, purpose and context

Question 2 (20 marks)

Explore how texts can represent and provide insight into shared human experiences, both
collective and individual. In your response make detailed reference to your prescribed
text.

The prescribed texts for Section II are:

Prose Fiction

George Orwell, Nineteen Eight-Four

Drama

Arthur Miller, The Crucible

Film

Stephen Daldry, Billy Elliot

END OF SECTION II

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