Week 37 · English Practice Paper

Reading Passage

The following passage is the beginning of a novel about a boy who believes that falling stars can grant wishes.

The Star in the Garden

Milo Fenn had always wanted to catch a falling star. Ever since he could remember, he'd believed that anyone quick enough to close their hand around one before it touched the ground would be granted a single, unrefusable wish. And perhaps some wishes really do come true, because when he was nine years old, a star fell directly into his garden.

It was enormous — far larger than any star had a right to be — its whole body glowing a soft, steady silver, with a long tail of light trailing behind it like a ribbon someone had forgotten to tie off.

It was shaped, more or less, like a boy. Or was it a girl? Milo had to look twice to decide, and even then he was not entirely sure.

The star had come down on a clear night in November, when frost had already silvered the grass and Milo's breath hung in clouds before his face. He'd been standing at his window when the curtains lit up gold, and there it was in the garden below, like a splinter of daylight that had been left over from noon and had nowhere else to go.

He loved its light before anything else. Warm, golden, endlessly moving light, forever rippling like the surface of a pond in sunshine. When he reached out and let his fingers pass through the edge of it, it was like dipping his hand into water that somehow refused to be wet.

And perhaps, if the star had simply risen back into the sky and vanished, Milo could have told himself afterwards that he had imagined the whole thing, or dreamed it, the way dreams sometimes leak into the edges of being awake. But how could he explain what happened next? The star turned, slowly, and looked directly at him, its light dimming for a moment into something he could almost call a face.

It reached out one long arm of light and touched, very gently, the space just above his heart. The touch was as light as a moth's wing, and yet Milo felt it for days afterwards, a small warm coal that would not quite go out.

By the time he'd found the courage to climb out through the window, the star was already rising, faster than anything ought to be able to rise, until it was only a fading point among all the ordinary points of light. Milo stood alone in the frost long after it had gone, sure that somewhere above him it was still climbing, and that it would, one day, come back for him.

Option 1: Write the opening for a story in which a child is woken up by something mysterious or incredible happening outside.

• Build tension gradually — let the reader wonder what is happening before you reveal it.
• Use precise, sensory detail (sound, light, temperature) to make the mystery feel real.