Week 25 · English Practice Paper

Reading Passage

The passage below describes what happens when a girl named Nadia investigates a strange discovery in the overgrown corner of her grandmother's garden.

The Icehouse

Nadia caught the smell before she saw anything at all: something cold and mineral, like the inside of a fridge left open too long, mixed with a green, mossy sweetness that did not belong to an ordinary garden. It could not be Grandma's compost heap — that was three fields away, behind the orchard — and besides, this smell was coming from underground, seeping up between the roots of the old yew hedge. She pushed further through the brambles that had swallowed this corner of the garden for as long as she could remember, wondering whether a fox had dug a den here, or whether the smell was simply rot from the fallen branches littering the ground. The light was growing strange too, greenish and dim, as though something large and solid was blocking it out above her.

She stopped, listening. Nothing — except, very faintly, a steady drip, drip, drip, like a tap left running somewhere far below her feet. It was the middle of August, and yet the air here felt several degrees colder than anywhere else in the garden, as if she had stepped through an invisible door into another season entirely.

And then she saw it: a curved brick wall, half-buried beneath a slope of earth and ivy, with a low arched doorway at its centre. Set into the stonework above the arch was a carved stone shield, worn nearly smooth by two hundred years of weather, and at its centre what might once have been a crescent moon. She didn't know whether to run for Grandma or to creep closer, so for a moment she did neither, standing quite still and listening to the drip, drip, drip coming from behind the old iron-studded door.

She found the door unlocked — untouched for years, judging by the rust-red streaks bleeding down the ironwork — and heaved it inward with both hands. Steps led down into darkness, and the cold breathed up at her, carrying that same mineral smell, stronger now. She fumbled for the torch in her pocket and swept its beam across the room below: a domed brick chamber, empty except for a heap of rotted sacking, a pair of ancient wooden-runnered sledges stacked against the wall, and, hanging from a rusted hook by the door, a small tarnished brass lantern that must have hung there, unmoved, since long before her grandmother was born.

Option 1: Write a detailed description of a night journey on a train.

• Use all five senses to build atmosphere, not just what can be seen.
• Think about pace — you can slow down at the moments you want the reader to notice most.

Option 2: Write a detailed description of an inventor who guards a dangerous secret.

• Build your character gradually through small details rather than stating everything at once.
• Consider how the character moves, speaks and behaves when they think no one is watching.