Step By Step School, Noida
PRACTICE EXAMINATION - X IGCSE (2024)
Name of Subject: Literature in English Subject code: 0475/01
Paper No.1: Poetry & Prose Month and Year: January 2024
Duration of the paper: 1 hour 30 mins
You must answer on the enclosed answer booklet.
You will need: Answer booklet (enclosed)
READ THESE INSTRUCTIONS FIRST
Write your Centre number, candidate number and name on all the work you hand in.
Write in dark blue or black pen.
You may use a soft pencil for any diagrams, graphs, or rough work.
Do not use staples, paper clips, highlighters, glue, or correction fluid.
Answer two questions in total:
Section A: answer one question.
Section B: answer one question.
The total mark for this paper is 50. All questions are worth equal marks.
At the end of the examination, fasten all your work securely together.
[This document consists of 5 printed pages.]
Page 1
SECTION A: POETRY
Answer one question from this section.
Remember to support your ideas with details from the writing.
Either 1 Read this poem and then answer the question that follows it:
Request To A Year - Judith Wright
If the year is meditating a suitable gift,
I should like it to be the attitude
of my great- great- grandmother,
legendary devotee of the arts,
who having eight children 5
and little opportunity for painting pictures,
sat one day on a high rock
beside a river in Switzerland
and from a difficult distance viewed
her second son, balanced on a small ice flow, 10
drift down the current toward a waterfall
that struck rock bottom eighty feet below,
while her second daughter, impeded,
no doubt, by the petticoats of the day,
stretched out a last-hope alpenstock 15
(which luckily later caught him on his way).
Nothing, it was evident, could be done;
And with the artist's isolating eye
My great-great-grandmother hastily sketched the scene.
The sketch survives to prove the story by. 20
Year, if you have no Mother's day present planned,
Reach back and bring me the firmness of her hand.
In the poem ‘Request To A Year’, how does the poet illustrate the role of art in shaping and preserving a
family legacy?
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The Spirit Is Too Blunt an Instrument - Anne Stevenson
The spirit is too blunt an instrument
to have made this baby.
Nothing so unskillful as human passions
could have managed the intricate
exacting particulars: the tiny 5
blind bones with their manipulating tendons,
the knee and the knucklebones, the resilient
fine meshings of ganglia and vertebrae,
the chain of the difficult spine.
Observe the distinct eyelashes and sharp crescent 10
fingernails, the shell-like complexity
of the ear, with its firm involutions
concentric in miniature to minute
ossicles. Imagine the
infinitesimal capillaries, the flawless connections 15
of the lungs, the invisible neural filaments
through which the completed body
already answers to the brain.
Then name any passion or sentiment
possessed of the simplest accuracy. 20
No, no desire or affection could have done
with practice what habit
has done perfectly, indifferently,
through the body's ignorant precision.
It is left to the vagaries of the mind to invent 25
love and despair and anxiety
and their pain.
Or
2. Discuss how Anne Stevenson comments on the human body and the human spirit in her poem ‘The Spirit is
too Blunt an Instrument’.
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SECTION B: PROSE
The War of the Worlds – H. G. Wells
Answer one question from this section.
Remember to support your ideas with details from the writing.
Either 3 Read this extract, and then answer the question that follows it.
Then my brother’s attention was distracted by a bearded, eagle-faced man lugging a
small handbag, which split even as my brother’s eyes rested on it and disgorged a
mass of sovereigns that seemed to break up into separate coins as it struck the ground.
They rolled hither and thither among the struggling feet of men and horses. The man
stopped and looked stupidly at the heap, and the shaft of a cab struck his shoulder and 5
sent him reeling. He gave a shriek and dodged back, and a cartwheel shaved him
narrowly.
“Way!” cried the men all about him. “Make way!”
So soon as the cab had passed, he flung himself, with both hands open, upon the heap
of coins, and began thrusting handfuls in his pocket. A horse rose close upon him, and 10
in another moment, half rising, he had been borne down under the horse’s hoofs.
“Stop!” screamed my brother, and pushing a woman out of his way, tried to clutch
the bit of the horse.
Before he could get to it, he heard a scream under the wheels, and saw through the
dust the rim passing over the poor wretch’s back. The driver of the cart slashed his 15
whip at my brother, who ran round behind the cart. The multitudinous shouting
confused his ears. The man was writhing in the dust among his scattered money,
unable to rise, for the wheel had broken his back, and his lower limbs lay limp and
dead. My brother stood up and yelled at the next driver, and a man on a black horse
came to his assistance. 20
“Get him out of the road,” said he; and, clutching the man’s collar with his free hand,
my brother lugged him sideways. But he still clutched after his money, and regarded
my brother fiercely, hammering at his arm with a handful of gold. “Go on! Go on!”
shouted angry voices behind. “Way! Way!”
There was a smash as the pole of a carriage crashed into the cart that the man on 25
horseback stopped. My brother looked up, and the man with the gold twisted his head
round and bit the wrist that held his collar. There was a concussion, and the black
horse came staggering sideways, and the carthorse pushed beside it. A hoof missed
my brother’s foot by a hair’s breadth. He released his grip on the fallen man and
jumped back. He saw anger change to terror on the face of the poor wretch on the 30
ground, and in a moment he was hidden and my brother was borne backward and
carried past the entrance of the lane, and had to fight hard in the torrent to recover it.
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He saw Miss Elphinstone covering her eyes, and a little child, with all a child’s want
of sympathetic imagination, staring with dilated eyes at a dusty something that lay
black and still, ground and crushed under the rolling wheels. “Let us go back!” he 35
shouted, and began turning the pony round. “We cannot cross this—hell,” he said and
they went back a hundred yards the way they had come, until the fighting crowd was
hidden. As they passed the bend in the lane my brother saw the face of the dying man
in the ditch under the privet, deadly white and drawn, and shining with perspiration.
The two women sat silent, crouching in their seat and shivering. 40
Then beyond the bend my brother stopped again. Miss Elphinstone was white and
pale, and her sister-in-law sat weeping, too wretched even to call upon “George.” My
brother was horrified and perplexed. So soon as they had retreated he realised how
urgent and unavoidable it was to attempt this crossing. He turned to Miss Elphinstone,
suddenly resolute. 45
“We must go that way,” he said, and led the pony round again.
For the second time that day this girl proved her quality. To force their way into the
torrent of people, my brother plunged into the traffic and held back a cab horse, while
she drove the pony across its head. A waggon locked wheels for a moment and ripped
a long splinter from the chaise. In another moment they were caught and swept 50
forward by the stream. My brother, with the cabman’s whip marks red across his face
and hands, scrambled into the chaise and took the reins from her.
“Point the revolver at the man behind,” he said, giving it to her, “if he presses us too
hard. No! — point it at his horse.”
Then he began to look out for a chance of edging to the right across the road. But once 55
in the stream he seemed to lose volition, to become a part of that dusty rout.
[From Chapter 16]
How does Wells use this passage to effectively comment on human nature?
OR
4. How does Wells treat the concept of ‘the survival of the fittest’ in his novel ‘The War of the Worlds’?
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