Week 27 · English Practice Paper

Reading Passage

Read this extract: the narrator has won a place on a two-week residential trip for young inventors, and is waiting to board a coach. Spend around 30 minutes answering the questions below.

The Coach to Ardgorm

We formed an untidy huddle in the crowded coach station, easy to pick out from everyone else by our matching red Spark! Young Engineers sweatshirts, or at least by the laminated badges pinned to our coats. We were going to spend the next fortnight together, fifty young inventors from all over the country. We were the winners of a nationwide competition run by the Spark! television programme, and part of our time would be spent at an engineering residential centre in the Scottish Highlands; part of it visiting a working wind farm on the coast.

I had never travelled anywhere without an adult from my own family before, and although the coach journey itself didn't frighten me in the slightest, I was beginning to feel nervous all the same. I had won my place with a fairly ordinary soil-moisture sensor for allotment vegetable beds, cobbled together from an old kitchen timer and a handful of spare wires. I suppose I am the sort of person who is good at getting small details exactly right without ever seeing the bigger picture. I had only entered the competition because I liked my design and technology teacher, and building the sensor had felt like any other interesting piece of homework. I hadn't thought any further than that.

Two presenters from the Spark! programme had come to see us off — Mo Kanu and Freya Voss. They stood at the centre of a small, chattering crowd, Mo tall and broad-shouldered with a booming laugh, Freya small and quick with cropped orange hair. Both of them looked exactly as warm and funny as they did on television. They were the only people there I actually wanted to go up and speak to, since I already felt I knew them a little. But I understood that this was an illusion. Television is not the same as real life. So instead I walked about on my own, counting my fellow prizewinners.

There were thirty-eight teenagers gathered at the coach station, and twelve adult helpers including Mo and Freya. Fifty winners had been announced altogether, but the other twelve prizewinners were travelling up separately from Scotland itself. Waiting there among total strangers, I found myself noticing small, telling details about the people around me. A girl near the ticket machine was clutching a battered birdhouse with a tiny solar panel bolted crookedly to its roof. A boy by the water fountain had an enormous rucksack so stuffed with loose, rattling gears that it clinked with every step he took. Beside him stood another boy, red in the face and hugging a battered robotic arm to his chest as though someone might try to take it from him, refusing to set it down even to adjust his glasses, which had slid almost to the tip of his nose.

One boy stood apart from the rest of us entirely, wearing a fluorescent orange safety vest several sizes too large, the sleeves rolled up in thick, clumsy folds. He kept glancing anxiously towards the car park, as though still hoping an adult might appear to collect him and take him home again. When the coach at last pulled in, hissing and enormous, he was the last to climb aboard, and he did so without saying a single word to anybody.

Option 1: Write a story with the title 'The Journey'.

• You could write about a time you have experienced, or use your imagination and create a fictional story. (25 marks)

Option 2: Write a story which starts with this sentence: 'The corridor seemed to stretch on forever.' (25 marks)

• Plan your story carefully before you begin.
• Use descriptive techniques to build a strong sense of atmosphere.