Unseen passages, answered under time. This is the examination’s largest single section and the one that improves fastest with practice.
1. Read this and answer in one sentence each: what has happened, and how do you know?
He counted the tins twice. Then he moved four of them to the back of the cupboard, where the light did not reach, and closed the door quietly, the way you close a door when somebody is asleep.
Answer 1
What: he is hiding food. How: the second count, the deliberate move out of sight, and the simile about somebody sleeping — which tells you there is another person in the house he does not want to wake or to know.
2. From the same passage: what does the last clause tell you about the relationship?
Answer 2
That care and concealment are happening at once. He is quiet for somebody — the same person he is hiding the tins from. A weaker answer says “he is sneaky”; the passage will not support only that.
3. Identify the technique and its effect: the light did not reach.
Answer 3
Understatement doing the work of a metaphor: the cupboard’s dark is literal, and it also names what he is doing to the household — keeping something out of the light. Naming the device is worth nothing without the second half of that sentence.
4. Under time: read an unseen paragraph for four minutes and write one analytical paragraph in eight. Then check it against The Paragraph.
Answer 4
No fixed answer. The check: claim in sentence one, evidence quoted by sentence three, and at least two sentences of analysis. If the paragraph ends where the quotation ends, it is not finished.
5. The examination asks “how does the writer create X?” Rewrite that question in your own words before answering it.
Answer 5
“What did the writer do, in the words on this page, that produced X in me?” That rewrite is the whole method: it forces you back to the text rather than to your impression of it.
Curriculum connection
B1.2
select and use appropriate reading comprehension strategies before, during, and after reading to understand texts, including increasingly complex texts (e.g., make jot notes based on teacher prompts during a read-aloud; pose questions about a character’s motivation or actions in a fictional text; role-play alternative solutions to a conflict presented in a text; activate prior knowledge about a topic using an anticipation guide)
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B1.4
make and explain inferences about texts,
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