Year 11 ICAS English 5-Question Sample

Question 1 of 5 Voice

The speaker has told her players for eleven seasons that a score is only a number. Which reading of her account survives a second reading of everything else she reports?

Reading stimulus

What I Told the Team

For eleven seasons I said the same thing to the girls at the end of every grand final we lost, and I said it with my hand flat on the ball so they would look at me: the score is a number and you are not. I believed it when I said it. I believe it still, and I say it to the under fifteens on a Saturday morning and would say it again tonight.

The cabinet in our hall holds the runners up shields from those seasons. I have them in order, and not by year. The two point loss to Warrandyte sits at eye height in the middle, because that is where you put the one you look at. I know which umpire called the last centre pass in that game and I know what she was wearing. When my daughter asked me last month who had won the flag the year she was born, I had to stop and think about it, and then I told her our margin before I told her the name of the club that beat us. The girls hear the speech about the number. Not one of them has ever seen the cabinet.

A She has stopped believing the speech she gives the girls. B The losses weigh on her far more than her speech allows. C She keeps the shields so that her players can learn from them. D She blames the umpire for the loss to the Warrandyte club.

Question 2 of 5 Structure

Several sentences in this proposal give ground to the other side. Which one puts the evidence for the plan itself in doubt?

Reading stimulus

Proposal: paid parking at Wilsons Point

The council should end free all day parking at Wilsons Point and charge four dollars an hour between October and March. Nobody disputes that the beach belongs to everyone, and the residents who have written against this plan plainly love their town. A charge will annoy the regulars who have parked there since the road was gravel, and this proposal should say so rather than pretend the annoyance away. It will also push some cars into the side streets behind the surf club, which is a nuisance the plan does not solve.

The case rests on the trial at Sandy Cove, where a charge cut all day parking by half and freed the spaces for short visits. That trial ran through summer only. Whether the same behaviour holds through the cold months, when the car park serves walkers rather than swimmers, has not been tested, and the officers who wrote the report say so themselves on the last page. Twelve other councils along this coast now charge and none has gone back to free parking. The fee would be reviewed after two years.

A The admission that the charge will annoy regular visitors. B The admission that some cars will move into the side streets. C The statement that the beach belongs to everyone. D The admission that the trial ran through summer only.

Question 3 of 5 Comprehension

The feature makes one claim about rider pay and offers several kinds of support for it. Which support does the most to establish that claim?

Reading stimulus

What the riders take home

Delivery riders in this city are paid less for the same work than they were two years ago. That is the claim, and it is worth setting out what stands behind it. Marisol, who has ridden for the same platform since she finished school, now works eleven hours to clear what nine hours cleared in her first winter. She is one rider, and she says herself that she is slower on hills than she used to be.

The platform's own rate card is public. The listed payment for a standard inner city drop has moved by nine cents since then, while the state registration charge for a scooter and the pump price of fuel have both risen far faster, and both of those figures are published monthly. A questionnaire handed to riders waiting outside one depot on a Thursday afternoon found most reporting lower takings, though the shift had just ended and nobody could say who had gone home already. The company says its rates remain competitive with the industry. A photograph on the previous page shows the queue outside that depot office.

A The account of one rider now working eleven hours for nine. B The published rate card set beside the published cost rises. C The questionnaire handed to riders outside the depot on Thursday. D The company statement that its rates remain competitive.

Question 4 of 5 Vocabulary

Most of this review reports how the novel is built. Which word carries the reviewer's verdict on the plotting?

Reading stimulus

First novel, second thoughts

Tanaka's first novel runs to three hundred and forty pages and covers eleven months in a river town during the last drought. It is told in the third person, past tense, and it moves between four households in a fixed order that never varies once it is established in the opening chapters. Each household gets a chapter before the order begins again.

The plot is tidy. Every gun that appears is fired, the flood at the end is prepared for in the second chapter, and no thread is left hanging when the book closes. The dialogue is written without quotation marks, a choice that takes about forty pages to stop noticing. Tanaka is best on work: the cutting of a levee bank, the queue at the water office, the smell of a stalled pump in February. Those passages are where the book slows down and looks hardest at what it is describing. The cover is by an artist from the same town.

A fixed B tidy C fired D past

Question 5 of 5 Structure

The layout beside this essay gives the length and the opening words of each paragraph. Which sentence is where the essay stops describing the pattern and starts arguing about what it means?

Reading stimulus

The narrator who counts

Barsanti's narrator counts things. He counts the steps from the gate to the door, the hours his father is away, the coins in the jar above the stove. Readers have long taken this for a tic of character. They see a boy who steadies himself with numbers, and the early reviews all said so.

But the counting is not steady. It thickens on the pages where his father is drunk and thins to nothing across the two chapters where the man is in hospital and cannot come home. A reader who tracks it finds no numbers at all in the calmest fifty pages of the book.

That pattern changes what the counting is for. It is not a habit the narrator carries with him; it is a measure of how much of the room he cannot look at, and the novel puts it there so that we can read his fear without him ever naming it.

Yet the last chapter counts nothing, and the boy is not calm. Barsanti gives him a plain, unnumbered page at the exact moment he decides to leave, and the absence does more work than any of the tallies before it.

How the essay is laid out

Paragraph	Sentences	Opens with
1	4	Barsanti's narrator counts
2	3	But the counting
3	2	That pattern changes
4	2	Yet the last chapter

A "But the counting is not steady." B "Yet the last chapter counts nothing, and the boy is not calm." C "Readers have long taken this for a tic of character." D "That pattern changes what the counting is for."

Year 11 English sample

Answer the sample questions

The speaker has told her players for eleven seasons that a score is only a number. Which reading of her account survives a second reading of everything else she reports?

Several sentences in this proposal give ground to the other side. Which one puts the evidence for the plan itself in doubt?

The feature makes one claim about rider pay and offers several kinds of support for it. Which support does the most to establish that claim?

Most of this review reports how the novel is built. Which word carries the reviewer's verdict on the plotting?

The layout beside this essay gives the length and the opening words of each paragraph. Which sentence is where the essay stops describing the pattern and starts arguing about what it means?