Week 38 · English Practice Paper

Reading Passage

The numbers refer to the paragraphs in the questions that follow. Please spend 40 minutes on this section.

The Frozen Delta

1. Across the frozen river toiled a team of sledge dogs, their coats stiff with hoar-frost. Each breath they took hung for a moment in white clouds before dropping as tiny crystals onto their fur. Broad leather straps bound them to a low sledge, one without runners, built instead from a single sheet of bent birchwood that slid flat along the crust of the snow.

2. The front of the sledge curled upward like the toe of an old boot, so that it would ride over the drifts rather than plough through them. Lashed on top, among the blankets and the coils of rope, lay an axe, a small iron stove, two sacks of dried fish, and a canvas bundle nobody had bothered to name.

3. Two men toiled at either end of the sledge, one at the front and one behind. Frost had gathered so thickly on their eyebrows and the fur trim of their hoods that their faces could scarcely be told apart, giving them the look of a pair of matching stone statues set out to guard some forgotten door. But beneath the frost they were still ordinary men, pushing on into a silence that seemed to have no end.

4. They travelled on without speaking, saving their breath for the effort of the journey. On every side lay nothing but silence, and that silence pressed upon their thoughts the way the weight of deep water presses upon a diver's chest.

5. An hour passed, and then another. The low winter sun was already sinking towards the hills when a thin, mournful cry rose out of the stillness, climbing higher and higher until it hung trembling in the icy air, and then died slowly away into nothing.

6. A second cry answered the first, needle-sharp and closer than before. Both men froze and turned their heads, marking where the sound had come from — somewhere behind them, off across the frozen delta they had crossed only that morning. Almost at once a third cry rose to meet it, further out towards the treeline, thin and searching, then a fourth.

7. "They're behind us, Aleks," said the man at the front, and his voice cracked with the effort of speaking after so long a silence. "Meat is scarce this winter," Aleks answered from the rear. "I haven't seen a hare's track in six days."

8. After that neither man spoke again, though both kept their ears turned constantly to the sounds still rising, one after another, from the darkening woods behind them.

Option 1: Write a diary entry in which you describe an interesting outdoor setting that you have visited.

• Give a detailed description of the place and its atmosphere.
• Describe your thoughts and feelings, not just what you saw.
• Use the senses and imagery to bring the setting to life.