4 exam-style questions with full mark schemes and model answers. Write your own answer and the AI examiner marks it against the mark scheme.
This poem, Five O'Clock City by the (fictional) poet Inez Carraway, describes a city in the last hour before it wakes.
At five the city is between two selves. The night shift drains away in ones and twos, the day shift has not started up its engines, and for one hour the streets belong to no one.
A fox trots down the middle of the road as if it pays the rates. A single light clicks on, four floors up, where a baby or a worry has got somebody out of bed.
The river carries yesterday downstream, a crisp packet, a headline, a dropped glove. The pigeons stir like grey thoughts on a ledge. Even the traffic lights change for nobody,
faithfully, red to green to red again, keeping a promise no one came to need. Then somewhere far off a first bus exhales, and the whole machine remembers what it is.
(This poem was written for this exercise.)
Analyse the ways the poet presents the city in the early morning in Five O'Clock City. You should consider the poet's use of language, form and structure and the effects created. (15 marks)
This poem, Visiting Hour by the (fictional) poet Hugh Brennan, describes a grandson sitting with his grandmother after a stroke.
They've put her by the window for the view, though half of what she sees has slipped away. I take the hand that still does what she wants; the other lies there, quiet as a guest.
She hunts for words the way you'd hunt for keys, patting at pockets that no longer hold them. A whole life of talk, and now she points, or laughs, or lets a long sentence collapse.
I have brought grapes because you bring grapes. We both know this. Her good eye finds the joke and shines at it, and for that half a second she is entirely herself, and then she's tired.
I learn her newer language as I sit: a squeeze for yes, a stillness for the rest. Outside, the same world carries cheerfully on. I hold the hand that holds. The other sleeps.
(This poem was written for this exercise.)
Analyse the ways the poet presents the grandmother's condition and the speaker's response to it in Visiting Hour. You should consider the poet's use of language, form and structure and the effects created. (15 marks)
This poem, Read 9:14 by the (fictional) poet Priya Devlin, describes a teenager waiting for a reply to a message.
The little word sits under what I sent. Read, it says, and then the time: nine fourteen. That was four hours and a lifetime back. I have not put the phone down since. I lie
and watch three dots appear, think better of it, and vanish, like a fish that won't be caught. I draft a casual thing, delete it, draft a cooler thing, delete that too, and wait.
The ceiling has become extremely interesting. I have invented seven reasons, each more reasonable and more wrong than the last. My thumb keeps waking up the dark to check.
It is amazing, the amount of weight one syllable can carry if it's silence. I know that this is small. I know tomorrow it will be nothing. Tonight it is the world.
(This poem was written for this exercise.)
Analyse the ways the poet presents the experience of waiting for a reply in Read 9:14. You should consider the poet's use of language, form and structure and the effects created. (15 marks)
This poem, Wildfire, On the News by the (fictional) poet Marcus Hale, describes watching a distant disaster on a screen.
We eat our dinner while the hillside burns. The screen is small and orange in the corner; the fire is very far away and loud with someone else's sirens, someone's smoke.
A reporter stands too calmly in a mask and gives the acres lost like cricket scores. Behind her, palm trees go up one by one like matches struck by an enormous hand.
I pass the salt. The dog wants to go out. The fire keeps its appointment with the dark, indifferent to our forks, our small warm room, the rain that here, of course, will not stop falling.
And then they cut to weather, and to sport, and fold the burning neatly into adverts. I should feel more than this. I scrape my plate. The hill goes on burning in another world.
(This poem was written for this exercise.)
Analyse the ways the poet presents the experience of watching a distant disaster on television in Wildfire, On the News. You should consider the poet's use of language, form and structure and the effects created. (15 marks)