Week 23 · English Practice Paper

Reading Passage

Read the following passage, written by a woman who spent several weeks filming a wildlife documentary series called Wild Horizons in Botswana. The extract is from a book about her time following a family group of elephants.

The Matriarch

1) Whatever I might have expected, my first sight of the herd was every bit as breathtaking as everyone had promised it would be. After a gruelling two-hour hike along the dry riverbed, my shirt soaked through with the effort, our tracker suddenly raised a hand and pointed ahead through the acacia scrub, to where Themba stood watching our approach.

2) Themba is around forty years old, and is the undisputed matriarch of her family group. She stood entirely at ease, one enormous ear fanned lazily forward, and it was only when I properly met her gaze that I understood what everyone had tried to describe to me. It was uncannily like meeting the eyes of another person — patient, watchful, unmistakably intelligent. Her eyes were the colour of wet amber, and held a calm, ancient knowingness quite unlike anything I had seen in an animal before.

3) I had barely recovered from the shock of that stare when two calves came crashing out of the undergrowth behind her, closely followed by Nandi, Themba's eldest daughter. One of the calves, still unsteady on his feet, trotted straight up to me and wrapped the very tip of his trunk around my wrist. That small, curious touch did more than anything else to convince me that we belong to the very same world as these animals, rather than standing outside of it.

4) I could hardly believe our good fortune in finding such a large family group so quickly, and in such open territory for filming. By the end of that first day we had captured footage of them drinking, dust-bathing, feeding and squabbling gently over the best patches of shade. That the light had stayed clear and golden for filming all afternoon was the cherry on top. But we all understood how quickly a herd's fortunes could turn, so for those first few days we made sure to spend every possible hour with them, finding them again each morning and staying with them until the light failed.

5) Mornings out there were often blanketed in a low mist that only lifted properly by mid-morning. After a hurried wash in the river, a slice of pawpaw and a tin mug of over-stewed tea, it was time to pack the cameras away into their cases and share the load between us. I had been issued a pair of heavy waterproof boots for the trip, and their soles looked like a pair of small, studded tank tracks, or a set of unusually determined tortoise shells, built to keep me from sliding about on the wet clay.

6) The daily rhythm of the herd begins with an early rise, well before the heat of the day sets in, followed by long, unhurried bouts of feeding. Around midday, when the sun is at its fiercest, the whole family gathers in whatever shade it can find for an hour or two of near-total stillness, the calves dozing against their mothers' legs. For that short stretch, an extraordinary calm settles over the whole group.

7) Themba's family rarely wandered entirely alone; over the course of our stay we frequently found ourselves among thirty or more elephants gathered loosely within sight of one another. The unhurried pattern of feeding and resting continued right through the afternoon, until, some time close to dusk, the herd would begin to drift together and settle for the night.

8) We soon learned that elephants are remarkably mobile creatures, capable of travelling widely in search of food and water as the seasons change. They feed mainly on grasses and leaves, though they will happily strip bark from a favourite tree or gorge themselves on ripening marula fruit whenever they find it.

Option 1: You have won a place on a young explorers' programme, travelling with a research team tracking mountain lions in Patagonia. Describe your most exciting day out in the field with the team.

• Use precise, sensory description of the landscape and the animals.
• Show how you feel as events unfold, not just what happens.

Option 2: Imagine you are a young elephant calf living with your family in the Kalahari. Describe your home, your family, and the things you get up to each day.

• Think carefully about how an elephant might experience the world differently to a human.
• Give your family members their own distinct personalities.