EduTest Year 11 Written Expression free practice questions with answers

Plan first, then write your response on the lined pages. Your plan is not marked. YOUR TASK Write a story about a character who inherits something unexpected. Type of writing: Narrative. Reader: your teacher. Planning space Use this box for a quick plan. It is not marked. TASK 1 OF 2 Narrative

A MODEL RESPONSE AND GUIDANCE FOR THAT TASK Step 1: Decode the task

• Type of writing: Narrative. The marker expects the conventions of this form.

• Reader: your teacher. Choose tone and vocabulary to suit them.

• Underline the verbs in the task. They tell you what the text must do: ‘Write a story’ means: create a character, a problem and a resolution. Step 2: Plan before you write

• Who is the character and what do they expect to inherit?

• The unexpected thing, and why it is a problem or a puzzle.

• What the character learns about the person who left it.

• How the character changes. Step 3: An annotated model response (about 245 words) The solicitor read the will in a voice so flat that Nell nearly missed the sentence that changed her year: “To my granddaughter, I leave the bees.” (1) She had expected the house, or the old Holden, or even the cracked teapot. Not forty thousand insects humming in six white boxes behind a shed. She drove out to the property the next day, planning to sell. The hives sat in a row beneath the peppermint gums, and the air above them shimmered. (2) A veil hung from a nail, with a note pinned to it in her grandmother's looping hand: Don't be afraid. They know when you are. Nell was afraid. She was stung twice in the first hour, and she cried quietly behind the shed, furious at a dead woman for leaving her this. (3) But on the third day, she found a notebook in the kitchen drawer, sixty years of entries: weather, flowers, queens, losses and, at the margins, small remarks about the granddaughter who never visited. She read until dark. The bees, she discovered, had been her grandmother's way of staying patient, and of staying in a place that asked nothing of her but attention. (4) By spring, Nell was lifting frames with a steady hand. She sold the house in the end, but she kept the bees, and each morning, before work, she crouched beside them in the cold and listened to the hum, learning at last what she had been left. (5) What the numbers show

(1) A will used as a hook. The strange bequest gives a clear and unusual problem.

(2) Setting that carries meaning. The shimmering air above the hives makes the place alive.

(3) A cost to the character. Fear, stings and anger make Nell's reaction believable.