How To Answer The Unseen Questions (Cambridge (CIE) IGCSE English Literature): Exam Questions

Read carefully the following passage. It is about a girl, Amara, on the morning her family must move out of the only home she has known.

The kettle had already been packed, so her mother boiled water in a saucepan, and they drank the last tea standing up because the chairs were gone.

Amara had not expected the flat to look so large without their things in it. All her life the rooms had felt crowded — the sofa too big, the hallway too narrow for two people to pass — but now, stripped to bare walls and pale rectangles where the pictures had hung, the place seemed to stretch and echo, as if it had been holding its breath for fourteen years and had finally let it out.

She walked from room to room while her mother wrapped the last cups. In the kitchen, a faint brown ring still marked the wall above the cooker, where the steam of a thousand dinners had settled. In the bathroom, her own height was recorded in pencil on the doorframe — a ladder of small lines climbing towards the top, each one dated in her father’s careful hand. She pressed her thumb against the highest mark and felt, absurdly, that if she rubbed hard enough she could keep it.

Outside, a lorry reversed into the courtyard with a long, patient beeping. Men in blue overalls came up the stairs, and the flat that had been so quiet was suddenly full of strangers and the squeal of tape pulled across boxes. Amara stood in the doorway of her bedroom and watched them lift her mattress as though it weighed nothing at all.

“Come and help, love,” her mother said, not unkindly. But Amara could not move. She was looking at the window, at the particular grey square of sky she had woken to every morning, the one crossed by the same television aerial and, in summer, by the swifts that screamed round the rooftops at dusk. She had never thought to wonder where the swifts went when they left. Now she understood that a place could be full of you without your ever noticing, and that you only felt the shape of it when it was taken away.

Her mother came and stood beside her. For a while neither of them spoke. Then her mother said, quietly, “We carry it with us. You’ll see.” She said it the way she said most difficult things — lightly, as if it were nothing — but her hand found Amara’s shoulder and stayed there, warm and certain, and Amara leaned into it without meaning to.

The last box went down. The door of the flat was left open behind them, the way you leave a door open for someone who might still be inside. Amara did not look back. But at the bottom of the stairs, where the light from the courtyard fell across the step, she stopped for just a moment, as though she had heard her name.

How does the writer make you feel about Amara’s experience of leaving her home?

To help you answer this question, you might consider:

• how the writer describes the empty flat and its small details

• how Amara’s thoughts and feelings change as she moves through the rooms

• how the writer makes the final moments so significant

Read carefully the following poem, in which the speaker notices himself becoming like his father.

Spit

It starts with the small things. The way

I check the locks twice, then a third time,

back door, front door, the bolt on the shed,

same circuit he walked every night of his life.

I’ve got his hands now — the same blunt thumbs,

the nail he lost to a car door in ’91

grown back wrong on me too, somehow,

though that was his door, his decade, not mine.

I say his sayings without meaning to.

“We’ll see.” “Money doesn’t grow on trees.”

The words come up like water from a well

I never knew I’d sunk, or he’d dug first.

For years I swore I’d not turn out like him.

Now here I am, at the mirror, half-past six,

shaving the exact same patch I always miss —

and there he is, looking back, missing it too.

By Neil Sowerby

How does the poet vividly convey the speaker’s feelings about becoming like his father?

To help you answer this question, you might consider:

• how the poet shows the father’s habits appearing in the speaker

• the speaker’s changing attitude across the poem

• how the ending makes this moment so striking

Read carefully the following passage. A girl, Nadia, stands on a high diving board for the first time.

The ladder had seemed like nothing from the ground.

Nadia had watched the others go up it all afternoon, one after another, stepping off the high board as easily as walking through a door, and she had thought: I can do that. But the ladder was longer than it looked, and the higher she climbed the more the rungs seemed to narrow under her wet feet, until she reached the top and the board stretched out in front of her, white and dry and utterly still, over a very long way of nothing.

She walked to the end of it because there was nowhere else to go. Behind her, someone was already climbing. Below, the pool had shrunk to a bright blue rectangle, and the people around it had become small and busy and far away, their voices flattened by distance into a single soft roar, like the sea heard through a shell. A breeze she had not felt on the ground moved across her arms and lifted the hairs there one by one.

She looked down. That was the mistake. The water, which had looked soft and welcoming from below, now looked hard as a tabletop, a flat blue lid over something she could not see the bottom of. Her toes curled over the rough edge of the board. Her heart was doing something complicated and painful against her ribs, and her legs had turned to something that was not quite bone.

“Whenever you’re ready,” a voice called up, kind and bored at the same time, the voice of someone who had said it a thousand times.

But that was the trouble. She would never be ready. There was no version of this where she felt ready. She understood, standing there with the whole blue afternoon holding its breath around her, that being ready was not a thing that arrived; it was a thing you decided, or didn’t. You either stepped off the edge of the ordinary world, or you turned round and climbed back down the ladder past all the waiting faces, and lived.

Somewhere far below, her little brother was watching. She could not see him but she knew he was, the way you always know. He thought she could do anything. It was the most annoying and the most necessary thing about him.

Nadia closed her eyes. She thought of nothing. And then, before the part of her that wanted to live could stop her, she let her weight tip forward into the empty air —

How does the writer create a sense of tension in this passage?

To help you answer this question, you might consider:

• how the writer describes what Nadia sees and feels on the board

• how the writer uses the people around her to build the tension

• how the ending leaves you feeling