HAST Year 9 Written Expression free practice questions with answers

Plan first, then write your response on the lined pages. Your plan is not marked. STIMULUS “We are what we repeatedly do.” YOUR TASK Write a reflective response to the statement, using a real or imagined experience. Type of writing: Reflective writing. Reader: a general reader. Planning space Use this box for a quick plan. It is not marked. TASK 1 OF 2 Reflective writing

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

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

• Reader: a general reader. Choose tone and vocabulary to suit them.

• Underline the verbs in the task. They tell you what the text must do: ‘Write a reflective piece’ means:

tell a real or imagined moment and say what it showed you. Step 2: Plan before you write

• Choose a habit, good or bad, and where it began.

• Show the habit in a daily scene.

• A moment when you saw what it was making of you.

• What you changed or understood.

• A closing line that returns to the statement. Step 3: An annotated model response (about 255 words) Every morning for three years, I have reached for my phone before I have opened my eyes. (1) It is the first thing my hand finds, a small, cool rectangle in the dark, and my thumb moves before my brain has decided anything. It began innocently, with an alarm. Then I started checking the time, then the weather, then a message, then a video, and by the time my feet touched the floor, I had already spent half an hour in other people's lives. (2) Nobody had made that choice for me; I had made it, again and again, until it stopped feeling like a choice. The moment I noticed was small. My little sister asked me a question while I was scrolling, and I answered without looking up. (3) She said, quietly, “You never really hear me anymore.” The words sat in my chest for the rest of the day. That night, I left the phone in the kitchen and bought a cheap alarm clock. The first week was uncomfortable, even lonely, as though I had mislaid a limb. (4) But by the second, I began to notice the light on the ceiling, the sound of birds and the strange silence of my own thoughts.

I am not cured, and I still fall back on bad days. But I understand now that habits do not simply describe us; they build us, one small repetition at a time. (5) We are what we repeatedly do, and the most important question is what we choose to repeat. What the numbers show

(1) A direct, honest opening. The first-person detail shows the habit before it is named.

(2) How a habit grows. Alarm, time, weather and video show how one small act multiplies.