STUDENT NUMBER

HIGHER

2023 SCHOOL
CERTIFICATE
TRIAL EXAMINATION

English Advanced
Paper 1 — Texts and Human Experiences

General Reading time – 10 minutes

Instructions Working time – 1 hour and 30 minutes
• Write using black pen
• A Stimulus Booklet is provided with this paper
• Write your student number at the top of each section

Total marks:
40 Section I – 20 marks (pages 2 -7)
• Attempt questions 1-5
• Allow about 45 minutes for this section

Section II – 20 marks (page 8)

• Attempt Question 6
• Allow about 45 minutes for this section
Section I

20 marks

Attempt Question 1-5

Allow about 45 minutes for this section

Read the texts on pages 2 – 7 of the Stimulus Booklet carefully and then answer the question in the spaces
provided. These spaces provide guidance for the expected length of response.

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Your answer 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

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 Question 1 (3 marks)

Use Text 1 to answer this question

How does the cartoon use both images and language to illuminate the role of perspective in the human
experience?

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Question 2 (4 marks)

Use Text 2 to answer this question

Analyse how the poet uses metaphor to represent the human qualities and emotions associated with living in
the contemporary world?

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 Section I (continued)

Question 3 (3 marks)

Use Text 3 to answer this question

Explain how the text represents Didion’s personal response to the challenging experience she faced.

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 Question 4 (4 marks)

Text 4 -Feature Article

How does the extract challenge assumptions and ignite new ideas about reading fiction?

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 Question 5 (6 marks)

(Choose from texts 1, 2, 3 or 4)

Compare the ways that TWO texts invite readers to see the world differently.

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End of Question 5

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Section II

20 marks

Attempt Question 6

Allow about 45 minutes for this section

Answer the question in the Section II Writing Booklet. Extra writing booklets are available.

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Your answer 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

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Question 6 (20 marks)

When you have lost hope, you have lost everything.

There is always hope.

― Pittacus Lore, I Am Number Four

To what extent does the statement above align with your understanding of how the text you
have studied provides insights into the human spirit?

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 JAMES RUSE AGRICULTURAL HIGH SCHOOL

2023
TRIAL HIGHER SCHOOL CERTIFICATE
EXAMINATION

English (Advanced)
Paper 1 — Texts and Human Experiences

Stimulus Booklet for Section I

Section I

Pages
• Text 1 Cartoon........................................................................2
• Text 2 Poem............................................................................3
• Text 3 Non-Fiction Extract…...................................................4-5
• Text 4 Feature Article…..........................................................6-7

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SECTION I- Text One – Cartoon

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Text Two – Poem

Not Fear

Not fear. Maybe, out there somewhere,

the possibility of fear; the wall
that might tumble down, because it's for sure
that behind it is the sea.
Not fear. Fear has a countenance;
It's external, concrete,
like a rifle, a shot bolt,
a suffering child,
like the darkness that's hidden
in every human mouth.
Not fear. Maybe only the brand
of the offspring of fear.

It's a narrow, interminable street

with all the windows darkened,
a thread spun out from a sticky hand,
friendly, yes, not a friend.
It's a nightmare
of polite ritual wearing a frightwig.
Not fear. Fear is a door slammed in your face.
I'm speaking here of a labyrinth
of doors already closed, with assumed
reasons for being, or not being,
for categorising bad luck
or good, bread, or an expression
— tenderness and panic and frigidity - for the children
growing up. And the silence.
And the cities, sparkling, empty
and the mediocrity, like a hot
lava, spewed out over
the grain, and the voice, and the idea.

It's not fear. The real fear hasn't come yet.

But it will. It's the doublethink
that believes peace is only another movement.
And I say it with suspicion, at the top of my lungs.
And it's not fear, no. It's the certainty
that I'm betting, on a single card,
the whole haystack I've piled up,
straw by straw, for my fellow man.

(Not Fear by Rafael Guillen)

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Text 3 - Non-Fiction Extract
This happened on December 30, 2003. That may seem a while ago but it won't when it happens to
you.
And it will happen to you. The details will be different, but it will happen to you.
That's what I'm here to tell you.
We had come home. Early evening, maybe eight o'clock. We discussed whether to go out or eat in. I
said we could stay in; I would build a fire.
The fire was the point.
In California we heated our houses by building fires. In Malibu we built fires even on summer
evenings because the fog came in. Fires said we were home, we had drawn the circle, we were safe
through the night.
I built the fire. I drew the circle.
I have no memory of what I meant to have for dinner.
Memory stops. The frame freezes. You'll find that's something that happens.
I warned you. I'm telling you what you need to know.
You see me on this stage, you sit next to me on a plane, you run into me at dinner, you know what
happened to me.
You don't want to think it could happen to you.
That's why I'm here.
John was in his office. I got him a drink. He sat down by the fire to read. He was reading a bound copy
of David Fromkin's Europe's Last Summer: Who Started The Great War in 1914? I set the table in the
living room, where we could see the fire. I must have noticed that later. The name of the book. I
eventually read it myself but found no clues.
Wait. I was telling you what happened.

I was at the table, making a salad. He was sitting across from me, talking. Either he was talking about
why World War One was the event from which the entire rest of the twentieth century flowed or he
was talking about the scotch, I have no idea which.

Then he wasn't. Wasn't talking. I looked up. I said, "Don't do that." I thought he was making a joke.

Slumping over. Pretending to be dead. You've seen people make that kind of tiresome joke. Maybe
you've done it yourself. Meaning "this was a hard day, we got through it, we're having dinner, we've
got a fire."

In fact neither of us had yet said out loud how hard that day had been.

My next thought was that he had started to eat and choked. I tried to move him so I could do the
Heimlich. He fell onto the table, then to the floor. There was a dark liquid pooling beneath his face.

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Within what I now know to have been exactly five minutes, two ambulances came.
I do not remember traffic. I do not remember sirens. When I got out of the ambulance the gurney
was already being pushed inside. Everyone was in scrubs. And I guess that was when I knew.

Life changes fast.

Life changes in the instant.

You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends.

The question of self-pity.

Those were the first words I wrote after it happened.

And after that-

I'm a writer-

But after that I didn't write anything for a long while.

(The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion)

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Text 4 - Feature Article

It’s a cliche to claim that a novel can change your life, but a recent study suggests almost a
fifth of readers report that fiction seeps into their daily existence.

Researchers at Durham University conducted a survey of more than 1,500 readers, with
about 400 providing detailed descriptions of their experiences with books. Nineteen per
cent of those respondents said the voices of fictional characters stayed with them even
when they weren’t reading, influencing the style and tone of their thoughts – or even
speaking to them directly. For some participants it was as if a character “had started to
narrate my world”, while others heard characters talking, or imagined them reacting to
things going on in everyday life.

According to one of the paper’s authors, the writer and psychologist Charles Fernyhough,
the survey illustrates how readers of fiction are doing more than just processing words for
meaning – they are actively recreating the worlds and characters being described. “For
many of us, this can involve experiencing the characters in a novel as people we can interact
with,” Fernyhough said. “One in seven of our respondents, for example, said they heard the
voices of fictional characters as clearly as if there was someone in the room with them.”

When they asked readers to describe what was happening in detail, the researchers found
people who described fictional characters remaining active in their minds after they had put
the book down, and influencing their thoughts as they went about their daily business – a
phenomenon Fernyhough called “experiential crossing”.

The term covers a wide range of experiences, from hearing a character’s voice to feeling
one’s own thoughts shaped by a character’s ideas, sensibility or presence, he continued.
“One respondent, for example, described ‘feeling enveloped’ by [Virginia Woolf’s] character
Clarissa Dalloway – hearing her voice and imagining her response to particular situations,
such as walking into a Starbucks. Sometimes the experience seemed to be triggered by
entering a real-world setting similar to one in the novel; in other situations, it felt like seeing
the world through a particular character’s eyes, and judging events as the character would.”
The characters who make the leap into readers’ lives are typically ‘powerful, vivid characters
and narrators’, Fernyhough added.

It’s an experience that the writer recognises from his own reading of Virginia Woolf and
contemporary authors such as Richard Powers and Ali Smith. “Some of my most powerful
reading experiences come when I feel that the author has tinkered with the software of my
own brain,” he said. “I know I’m in the presence of a great author if she or he makes me
notice things I wouldn’t otherwise have noticed, because the voice and sensibility on the
page is sharpening my attention and bringing details into the light, and because I’m starting
to think like them.”

The results struck a chord with the novelist Edward Docx, who recalled reading JD Salinger’s
The Catcher in the Rye as a teenager. “I fell very heavily under the influence of Holden
Caulfield,” Docx said. “I think a lot of people do. The way that Salinger writes, which is so

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intelligent and literate and insightful and – for want of a better word – cool, was very
influential.” A dissenting, sardonic voice from the US was very attractive for someone
growing up in the UK, he continued. “It was definitely in my head. It gave me a way of
thinking and of being that wasn’t available in my immediate circumstances.”

According to Docx, fiction’s ability to let readers participate in lives other than their own is
the thing that sets it apart from other art forms. “It gives you the interiority of characters’
minds,” he explained. “The greatest film can’t do that, and neither can a computer game.
Only the novel can give you an intimate portrait of the complex cross-currents of human
psychology, to the extent where you know another person’s soul. And that’s the most
intimate thing in the world.”

For Fernyhough, creating a character who can touch readers is a real accomplishment.
Writing a novel whose characters can escape into the real world does feel “a bit like writing
software,” Fernyhough continued. “Or laying a minefield for the heart. You want to shape
how your readers think and feel – not in prescriptive ways that leave them no room to bring
their own experiences and interpretations, but to allow them to enter the minds of people
they are not, and to have something of their experiences.”

Docx compared the characters whose voices get into readers’ heads to secret friends. “You
wish you were great pals with Holden Caulfield, that you could sit around and trade
wisecracks with him,” he said. “Obviously it’s a form of madness, but then all fiction is a
form of madness.”

(Richard Lea The Guardian)

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