ABC Education · 11+ Practice

Week 36 · English Practice Paper

Reading: 15 marks · Writing: 15 marks · Suggested time: 45 minutes.

Reading Passage

In this extract, a girl called Elsie is staying with her grandmother. Unable to sleep, she creeps downstairs before dawn and lets herself out into the walled kitchen garden.

The Walled Garden

There is a certain hour, neither quite night nor quite morning, when the whole world seems to hold its breath. Only the earliest of risers ever sees it — the milkman on his round, perhaps, or a bird that has woken too soon — and for everyone else it passes by entirely unnoticed, folded away somewhere between one day and the next.

It was in this hushed, colourless hour that Elsie let herself out through the garden door. She had crept down from the attic room some time after midnight, unable to settle, and had sat for a long while on the bottom stair working up the courage to turn the great iron key. By the time she finally stepped onto the flagstones, the whole house lay silent behind her, and the sky above the wall had already begun to pale at its edges.

The garden itself seemed only half awake. Dew lay thick and silver over the cabbages and the espaliered pears, and every colour in the borders had been leached away to shades of grey, waiting for the sun to paint them in again. Somewhere near the glasshouse a wood pigeon clattered clumsily up out of the apple tree, wings beating in an ungainly panic, as though it too had been caught somewhere it ought not to be.

Elsie began to make her way around the paths on tiptoe, the gravel biting cold through her thin slippers. She kept close to the wall at first, tracing the whole boundary of the garden as though drawing a map of it in her mind, before turning off along the narrow way that ran between the runner-bean poles and the old brick cold-frames. Ahead of her, where the path opened out again beside the pond, she could just make out a faint, silvery gleam beneath the surface of the water, and she quickened her step to see what it was.

Section A: Reading

Question 1

[2 marks]

Re-read the opening paragraph. Who does the writer say is awake at this time?

Question 2

[1 marks]

Re-read the second paragraph. Give a quotation that suggests everything around Elsie is quiet.

Question 3

[5 marks]

Re-read the third paragraph. a) Give a quotation that shows you the wood pigeon looks ungraceful or moves ungracefully. b) Explain how your quotation shows this. Consider the meaning of the words and their associations.

Question 4

[7 marks]

Re-read the final paragraph. What does the writer want you to feel about the garden? Use quotations to explain your ideas and remember to consider the meanings of words and their associations. You could think about: - Elsie's reaction to the garden. - The atmosphere created by the description.

Section B: Writing

Choose ONE of the following:

Spend 15 minutes on this task, including the time you take to check your answer to ensure accuracy in spelling, punctuation and grammar.
10 marks are available for content, and 5 marks for spelling, punctuation and grammar.

Option 1: Write a short description of a person or animal waking up somewhere they do not recognise. Do not describe yourself. Your description could be real or imaginary.

Try to make it clear: where your person or animal is, what the place is like, and how they feel.
You might like to use the senses, and to include a simile or a metaphor.