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BBA PRACTICE EXAMINATION

2010
ENGLISH
Scholarship
QUESTION BOOKLET
93001
Time allowed: Three hours
This examination paper has THREE sections:
Section A Close Reading of unfamiliar texts
Section B Response to literature and language
Section C Exploring issues in literature and language
Write THREE essays in total, ONE for EACH question, in the separate Answer
Booklet. If you need more rell paper, ask the Supervisor. Name any extra sheets
you use, and hand all of these in with your Answer Booklet at the end of the
examination.
Each essay is worth eight marks.
Check that this Question Booklet has pages 2-8 in the correct order.
HAND IN BOTH BOOKLETS AT THE END OF THE EXAMINATION.
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STUDENTS NAME

BBA Educational Resources 2010

Outcome Description
The student will respond critically to demanding texts and questions by means of
extended and informed argument
Scholarship Criteria
The student will:
demonstrate extensive knowledge of texts and methods used in crafting them
respond critically with mature ideas and independent reection
sustain coherent, substantiated and engaging argument
Scholarship with Outstanding Performance Criteria
In addition to meeting the criteria for Scholarship, the student will:
demonstrate an exceptional level of sustained critical response showing
consistent ability to synthesize knowledge, understanding and argument
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You have three hours to answer THREE questions from this booklet.
Write a response, in the form of an essay of at least 800 words, to EACH of the following:
SECTION A
ONE topic from SECTION B (topics 1-13)
ONE topic from SECTION C (topics 14-26)
You must write a total of THREE essays.
Each essay should:
demonstrate an extensive knowledge of the texts and the methods used in crafting
them
respond critically with mature ideas and independent reection
sustain coherent, substantiated and engaging argument
show accurate use and control of the conventions of academic writing
USE THIS SPACE FOR PLANNING.
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SECTION A: CLOSE READING OF UNFAMILIAR TEXTS
The following two passages deal with sadness. Write an essay comparing the treatment of sadness and
the crafting techniques used to reveal the theme.
Text A: In this piece, Sarah is trying to arrange a baby for adoption and nds out that she may not be able
to get her rst choice. The narrator is the babysitter Sarah has arranged to help her with bringing up the
adopted child.
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From Childcare
Sarah pulled the phone from her bag, slowing the car slightly as she did. Excuse me, she said to me.
Yeah? she said into the phone.
Sarah, hi, its Letita, I heard.
Hi Letita. I believed I wasnt supposed to listen, so I looked out the window at the bleak snowy
landscape, the sun was low and feeble, dissolving whitely like a lemon drop. When I looked back
at Sarah I saw her powdered, thinning skin like a crpe, with the same light freckles as a crpe, her
gnarly-knuckled hand arthritic from chopping herbs, going through her spiky russet hair, knocking
back her scarf.
I suppose I believed that if a pretty woman was no longer pretty she had done something bad to
deserve it. I had a young girls belief that this kind of negative aging would never happen to me. Death
would happen to me I knew this from reading British poetry. But the drying, hunching, blanching,
hobbling, fading, fattening, thinning, slowing? I would just not let those things happen to moi.
I could hear Letita: If this doesnt work out with Amber, there are babies on the international
market. Weve had a lot of luck with South America. Paraguay has opened up again, and other
countries, too. And theyre not all brown there, either. Theres been a lot of German inuence, and
some of these kids are beautiful, very blond, or blue-eyed, or both.
Well, thanks for the info, Sarah said brusquely. Get back to me on Amber, she said and
snapped the phone shut.
The babies of Nazis, Sarah said, shaking her head. Theyre hawking Nazi babies. Racially
superior. Unbelievable. She raked her ngers again through the bright desert grass of her hair. Blue
eyes! she cried. The human race has really come a long way! She shook her head again, this time
with a horsey, nasal exhalation of disgust.
Yeah, I said dopily.
You may be too young to know this yet, but eventually you will look around and notice: Nazis
always have the last laugh.
She put a CD in the car player. Bachs rst French suite. Do you know it? After some clicking
and static, it began, stately and sad. I think so, I said, not sure at all.
Oh, its the most beautiful thing, she said. Especially with this pianist. It was someone
humming along with the light dirge of the Bach. The piece was like an elegant interrogation made of
tangled yarn, a query from a well-dressed man in a casket, not yet dead. It proceeded slowly, like a
careful equation, and then not: if x equals y, if major equals minor, if death equals part of life and life
part of death, then what is the sum of the innite notes of this one phrase? It asked, answered, re-
asked, its melody asking a renement or reluctance or dislike. I had never heard a melody quite like it.
Outside my house, Sarah put the car in park. She patted me on the shoulder, then let her hand run
down my coat sleeve. Thanks, she said. Phone me when you get back into town after Christmas.
Her face looked fantastically sad.
O.K, I said. Sounds good. Sounds good. It was the Midwestern girls reply to everything. It
appeared to clinch a deal, was somewhat the same as the more soldierly Good to go, except that it
was promiseless mere afrmative description. It got you away, out the door.
Source (adapted): Lorrie Moore, Childcare, short story in The New Yorker, July, 2009
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It will not gleam
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The ftful fap of sheets pegged on the line
is a kind of sadness, like desultory applause
that starts only to fail, all decrescendo,
for the stand-up comic whose routine
trades in all the ways a man walks into a bar,
all the reasons, the sad old reasons.
In the crazed porcelain of the handbasin,
with its thin green smear of algae that grows
stubborn and small, theres a dullness.
It will not gleam. A smell of almonds
and camphor, of bitter dust, the dust
that collects on top of books you are reluctant
to open for all the sadness that waits there.
This is what becomes of our human traces,
the sloughed skin, the nameless hair.
Sadness in the static of the radio, wandering
from its station, the voices tiny, overwhelmed;
in the potted geranium, its hopeless
red fare, its unanswered call. The sadness
of punctuation, its hesitation; of correct
grammar, its syntax winding to inevitable
conclusions. The sadness of loss, and most
of all, of the unthinking, ordinary moment
when sadness is forgotten, the good joke
thats on us, in the end, when the moment slides
unnoticed into elegy, the sheets hanging
now, caught as they are in the grey stands of rain.
Source: Tim Upperton, a house on re
(Steele Roberts, Wellington, 2009), pp. 18-19.
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TEXT B: It will not gleam
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Write a coherent and engaging essay in response to ONE of Topics 113. Use the topic as the
focus for an in-depth discussion of a relevant text or texts.
Your discussion should reect independent thinking about your chosen genre, substantiated by
frequent, appropriate and integrated references and/or quotations.
Note: No content or quotations used in your answer to this section should be repeated in Section C.
TOPICS (Choose ONE)
1. The novel as a genre has a central preoccupation: the complexities of the self negotiating
the conventions of society.
Discuss this statement, referring to one or more novels you have studied.
2. At the end of a complex long narrative, the last thing a reader wants is a happy ending.
Discuss this statement, referring to one or more novels you have studied.
3. Poetry is best when it is oblique and therefore requiring interpretation and analysis.
Discuss the benet of obliqueness in poetry, by referring to poems you have studied.
4. Content and form are inextricably linked in poetry, and we need to pay attention to both
aspects if we are to be comprehensive in our understanding of poetic meaning.
Discuss the link between content and form in poems you have studied.
5. The short story writer is always trying to reveal the inner life of his or her characters.
Discuss this prescription for a short story writer, by referring to short stories you have
studied.
6. Ben Jonson, a contemporary of Shakespeare, wrote that Shakespeare was not of an
age, but for all time.
Discuss the validity of this statement, referring to one or more plays by Shakespeare you
have studied.
7. Shakespearean plays whatever the genre dramatise characters making decisions
about relationships in their various forms.
Discuss this particular form of decision making in one or more plays by Shakespeare you
have studied.
SECTION B: RESPONSE TO LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE
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8. The dramatist is always performing surgery on the society around him/her, analysing
faults and rectifying problems.
Discuss the appropriateness of the surgical metaphor for understanding a dramatists
function, by referring to one or more plays you have studied.
9. The medium of lm is not suited to critical analysis because moving images mesmerise
us rather than goad us into reection.
Discuss the effect of lm images, by referring to one or more lms you have studied.
10. To hold their audiences, modern lm makers must ensure the conventions and tropes of
genre lm making are kept fresh.
Discuss the importance of freshness in modern lm making, referring to one or more
lms you have studied.
11. Modern media offers marketers the opportunity (which they are taking) to produce
advertisements and brochures that are as aesthetic as poems.
Discuss the validity of this statement, referring to a range of relevant language texts you
have studied.
12. The internet increases neural activity in the brain because it triggers key centres in control
of decision making and complex reasoning.
Discuss the merits of this comment about the internet, referring to a range of relevant
electronic texts you have studied.
13. It is a false dichotomy to categorise the print world as either ctional or non-ctional.
Discuss this statement, referring to one or more non-ction texts you have studied.
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Write a coherent and engaging essay in response to ONE of Topics 1426. Use the topic as the
focus for an in-depth discussion of a relevant text or texts.
Your issues-based discussion should reect independent thinking and show extensive
knowledge of a range of appropriate texts, their purposes, and the methods used in crafting
them, substantiated by frequent,appropriate and integrated references and/or quotations.
Note: No content or quotations used in your answer to Section B should be repeated in this section.
TOPICS (Choose ONE)
14. Literary response is paradoxical in that authors often concentrate on a painful human
experience, and yet readers gain pleasure from the skilled writing that evokes it.
Discuss the extent to which this statement is valid, referring to genres you have
experienced.
15. Contemporary literature often has surveillance as its theme.
Discuss the contemporaneity of literature with surveillance as the thematic focus, referring
to a range of texts you have studied.
16. Is it important to take into consideration authorial intent or do texts offer opportunities to
interpret without any recourse whatsoever to the author?
Respond to this question, referring to a range of texts you have experienced.
17. To what extent is literary study the arena where the great social debates take place?
Respond to this question, referring to a range of texts you have studied.
18. Alienation is the dominant contemporary consciousness.
Discuss the extent to which you agree with this statement, referring to a range of relevant
texts you have experienced.
19. Harold Bloom argues that literature has benets for the individual in that it renes the
readers understanding, but it has no social utility whatsoever. To what extent do you
agree with Blooms assessment of the value of literature?
Refer to a range of texts you have experienced.
20. How prevalent is the theme of disappointment in literature you have read?
Respond to this question, referring to a range of texts you have experienced.
21. Are imaginative worlds for escapism or moral understanding?
Respond to this question, referring to a range of texts you have experienced.
SECTION C: EXPLORING ISSUES IN LITERATURE AND LANGUAGE
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BBA Educational Resources 2010

22. A key criterion for literary value should be the extent to which the text takes the reader
meaningfully out of his/her comfort zone.
Discuss the validity of this statement, referring to a range of texts you have experienced.
23. We need cultural and gender diversity in our reading, so we can understand the common
reach of our humanity. To what extent is cultural and gender diversity important in reading
lists?
Refer to a range of texts you have experienced.
24. Establishing a literary canon and therefore a hierarchy of reading priority is still important.
Discuss the validity of this statement, referring to a range of texts you have experienced.
25. The French critic Jacques Derrida argued that students of contemporary culture need
to be in a state of constant vigilance. By referring to a range of contemporary texts you
have experienced (eg. lms, novels, blogs, advertisements), discuss the importance of
constant vigilance.
26. Modern visual media are implicitly manipulative sites for those with language/graphical
skills and the desire to peddle products or ideas.
Discuss the connection between modern visual media, manipulation and language/
graphical skills, by referring to a range of relevant texts.