Analysing past exam questions

Follow the links to find information and sample questions for the three sections of Paper 1:

Paper 1 Section 1

Paper 1 Section 2

Paper 1 Section 3

Paper 1 Section 1

You will be expected to closely read a selection- usually 3; occasionally 4 - of text types.

You are highly unlikely to have seen texts before.

Over the last six years of the HSC, there have been:

• 3 poems

• 2 prose extracts             

• 5 out of the 6 years have included visual texts

Conclusions:

• You need to be familiar with a range of text types and deconstructing them

• You need to be familiar with visual texts and deconstructing them

• You need to be able to deconstruct texts for: structural features; language forms and features and visual forms and features.

 The questions asked are what is called scaffolded - they become increasingly more challenging. Using the 2006 Paper, the difficulty of each question is indicated by the colour code listed below the table. And the more difficult the question the more marks it is worth and the more you have to write.

• Question (a)

• Question (b)

• Question (c)

• Question (d)

• Question (e)

• Question (f)

Paper 1 Section 2

Journeys questions in Paper 1 Section 2 usually provide you with 'stimulus' to write about. This will be on the Area of Study topic: Journeys. You will already be thinking along this line because you will have just completed the Reading section of the Paper in which you answered questions on a number of texts.

This stimulus for writing can be anything:

• a cartoon;

• a paragraph;

• an image;

• a map

• a number of items eg quotations etc.

It may be connected to the texts you have worked with in Section 1.

The stimulus is a prompt to your thinking and writing. Read the question for its clues:

• the assessment criteria at the top?

• composer's (your) persona?

• text type?

• audience?

• purpose? etc.

Paper 1 Section 3

Journeys questions in Paper 1 Section 3 can ask you to write argument style responses (the essay) or to present an argument in a more creative form. They will all require you to respond to some proposition about 'journeys' that will allow students of all three focus areas (Physical Journeys, Imaginative Journeys and Inner Journeys) to respond.

Try to think about Journeys in as many different ways as you can, bearing in mind that you will have to refer to your prescribed text, the Stimulus Booklet and the related material you have collected.

A good way to do this is to track down some quotations on Journeys. Don't choose anything too long and choose one's that are straight forward, such as those that follo.

http://www.quotationspage.com/ produces a number of responses to 'journey':

• We don't receive wisdom; we must discover it for ourselves after a journey that no one can take for us or spare us. Marcel Proust (1871 - 1922)

• The longest journey is the journey inward. Dag Hammarskjold (1905 - 1961)

• Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is often more important than the outcome. Arthur Ashe

• Even with the best of maps and instruments, we can never fully chart our journeys. Gail Pool

• A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. Lao-tzu (604 BC - 531 BC), The Way of Lao-tzu

• It is good to have an end to journey towards; but it is the journey that matters in the end. Ursula K. LeGuin

http://www.quoteland.com/search.asp

• That's the best thing about walking, the journey itself. It doesn't matter much whether you get where you're going or not. You'll get there anyway. Every good hike brings you eventually back home.
  -Edward Abbey

• Time is a companion that goes with us on a journey. It reminds us to cherish each moment, because it will never come again. What we leave behind is not as important as how we have lived.
  -Anon.

• "I may not have gone where I intended to go, but I think I have ended up where I intended to be."
  -Douglas Adams

• "Do not follow where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path and leave a trail. Only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out how far one can go."
  -TS (Thomas Stearns) Eliot