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Level 2 English, 2013

91100 Analyse significant aspects of unfamiliar written
text(s) through close reading, supported by evidence
9.30 am Tuesday 12 November 2013
Credits: Four

RESOURCE BOOKLET
Refer to this booklet to answer the questions for English 91100.
Check that this booklet has pages 24 in the correct order and that none of these pages is blank.
YOU MAY KEEP THIS BOOKLET AT THE END OF THE EXAMINATION.

New Zealand Qualifications Authority, 2013. All rights reserved.

No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without the prior permission of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority.

TEXT A: NON-FICTION
This passage refers to the transit of Venus (the movement of that planet across the face of the Sun) that
occurred in 2012, an event previously witnessed by Captain James Cook in 1769. The author reflects on
the role of science in his life and the changing nature of scientific discovery.

A Transit of Venus
I watched a transit of Venus, once upon a time.
I had chosen for my viewing post a small clearing, on a low, bush-clad promontory above
a sweeping beach. The night before, a winter storm had pummelled the coast, dusting the
mountains with snow. In its wake the sky was cloudless and transparent. Below me, lingering
Tasman Sea swells crashed against a tottering finger of rock, their white foam unexpectedly
bright in the gathering morning light.
My observatory was small but versatile. Two telescopes, binoculars, hand-held dark filters for
unmagnified naked-eye viewing. Cook and his sponsors were driven by curiosity: so wasI.
I watched for thirty minutes as Venus gradually revealed her presence, becoming visible by
concealment, masking part of the Sun. First a tiny sliver, hinted at rather than seen; then an
obvious bite out of the Sun, like a small chip in a dinner plate; finally a tangible midnight
disc, kissing the Sun from within and then detaching. Her full journey across the Sun would
take six hours. In the months leading up to the transit I realised I had been anticipating the
event, deep in my subconscious, since first reading about it in a childhood astronomy book
fifty years ago and realising it would happen within my lifetime. I felt no need to hurry.

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15

Children from the twenty-strong local school called by on their way home, fluttering like
fantails, well aware of what they were seeing. The hand-held filters were a big hit.
The Sun is so small!
Its round, just like the Moon!
Earlier in the day, the class had used the transit to talk about scale, in time as well as distance.
Our lifetimes are getting longer, their teacher suggested.
Our journey into the twenty-first century can be likened to a voyage of discovery, but it is
very different from what confronted the Endeavour. The world beyond the edge of Cooks
charts was unknown, but not unknowable. The technology of the day sufficed. The blanks
on the map were finite, and the compass showed where to find them. As the known world
expanded, the unknown world shrank.
Not so the coming century. Our awareness of rapid and irresistible technological change is
pervasive. As the children had just learned, horizons can be defined by time as well as by
space. The ocean in front of us is measured not by latitude and longitude, but by dimensions
made from technologies we have yet to discover, pointing along axes that we cannot yet
discern. And it might as well be infinite.

Glossed words
promontory a prominent piece of land that juts out into the sea
pervasive
widespread
Source (adapted): Martin Unwin, 105 Years (unpublished manuscript), pp 13, http://www.royalsociety.org.nz/
media/105Years_MartinUnwin_81.pdf (accessed 5 June 2013).

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TEXT B: POETRY
This poem, prompted by a crack appearing in a wall, reflects on situations in which two people cant find
a common approach to an issue that affects them both.

Cracked
In this drought
a crack has worked its way
up or down our lounge wall
a crinkle
to a hairline
to a mad jaw of a thing.

The builder talks of settling,

waiting for a change in the weather,
giving it a few days,
and you are fine
with putting panic on hold
for a rainy day,
while Im on a fault line,
looking up past the picture
you have hung to hide it,

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15

pulling out the settee

to see how much worse
it is tonight,
until the cross-hatch
of buckled tape
and seamed board

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look too much

like a mistake
or a torn page.
When wrinkles
spread across ceilings
and doors swell shut
so I have to tug and sweat
to get out,
I expect you to be there

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on the other side.

Source: Johanna Emeney, Cracked, in Trout 17, http://www.trout.auckland.ac.nz/journal/17/17_1.html
(accessed 5 June 2013).

TEXT C: FICTION
This passage is from a short story portraying a young narrators experience of growing up in rural New
Zealand. He is an imaginative child who finds comfort in dreaming of a different life.

The Daydreamer
I struggled into boyhood, an only child with an inhaler as my constant companion.
I became the kind of snotty-nosed eleven-year-old kid with spiky hair and shirt-tail hanging
out of his pants who, at our small primary school, was always on the sideline during school
sports days. And although nobody could keep me out of the haka team, I was the skinny
brown boy with the big hopeful eyes they tried to hide in the back.

Was I to blame, then, that denied a chance at real life, I would develop a fantastic imagination?
During class, I took to looking out the window so often that my teachers and other classmates
worked around me and left me alone to daydream. The main road between Uawa and
Gisborne ran past our school, and watching the cars, trucks, motorbikes and buses zooming
by kept my imagination busy. Where are they going? I asked myself as I pressed my nose
against the window. What kind of people are in the buses?

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Wondering who those people were, as they sped by, and what adventures they would have
when they reached their destination, was more engaging than listening to Four-Eyes Wilson
drone on and on about some dead English poet.
I often fantasised that thered been a mix-up in heaven on the day I was born and, instead
of being delivered to some movie star in Hollywood, I got sent to Uawa. One of these days,
though, I was going to hit that road, you wouldnt see me for dust, and go to America,
yeah, and bang on the door of some Hollywood mansion and, when Arnie opened the door
I would yell, Daaaaaad! Nobody would see me for dust.

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Tupaea, are you with us? On the planet?

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Oh, s-s-sorry, Mr Wilson.

Mr Wilson couldnt help himself. Hes b-b-back, everyone!

Glossed word
Arnie
Arnold Schwarzenegger (a star of action movies in the 1980s and 1990s)
Source (adapted): Witi Ihimaera, The Thrill of Falling, in The Thrill of Falling (Auckland: Random House, 2012),
pp210211.