Week 40 · English Practice Paper

Reading Passage

The passage below is about a young sheepdog called Fern and her handler, Grace Tavistock. Several of the older shepherds at the trial have doubted that Fern, still only two years old, has what it takes to bring a scattered flock down off open moorland — especially with a storm threatening. Grace has staked her family's reputation on proving them wrong.

Fern's Trial

Fern knew straightaway that everyone expected her to fail, and something in her small, sharp-eared body sat up and refused it. She had caught the mood of the crowd gathered along the drystone wall, and although she was barely two years old, she felt that she must do something remarkable for Grace, whatever it cost her. She was long and low through the body, built for creeping rather than galloping, with a coat the grey-black of wet slate and a chest deep enough to hold a whole morning's breath. Under the loose skin her muscles moved like rope being coiled and uncoiled. Her ears turned constantly, reading the wind, the sheep, the murmuring crowd, and her tail was held so still and so low that it seemed to be listening too. Men leaning on the wall studied her with narrowed eyes and murmured to one another that she was too young, too slight, too eager; old Selwyn Cutter, who had bred sheepdogs for forty years, offered anyone four to one against her finishing the course at all.

Grace crouched down in front of her before the off. She did not clap her hands or use the bright, coaxing voice she kept for visitors. Instead she rested her forehead against Fern's and spoke so quietly that only the dog could have heard the words. Fern's whole body trembled with the effort of keeping still, and when Grace straightened and stepped back, the dog let out one thin, high whine, as if in answer to a question nobody else had heard asked.

The crowd watched with a kind of puzzled curiosity, sensing that something more than a competition was taking place. "Away then, Fern," Grace called, and her voice cracked only slightly on the name. Fern was gone at once, flowing out wide and low across the tussocked grass in a long, silent arc, and the murmuring along the wall fell away into an uneasy hush.

It was the wind that turned first, swinging round hard from the north and bringing with it a wall of low grey cloud that swallowed the top of the moor in minutes. Then came the hail, stinging and sudden, and the whole hillside dissolved into confusion. Spectators who had been leaning comfortably on the wall now scattered for the cover of cars and horseboxes, clutching hats and children. Someone's terrier slipped its lead and shot off yelping into the bracken. A pony tethered to the refreshment trailer reared backwards in fright, snapped its rope, and cantered off across the car park, scattering camping chairs in every direction. Up on the open ground, the flock of forty ewes, already unsettled by the noise, broke into three panicking groups and ran for the gorse. Through all of it, Fern never once quickened into a gallop. She dropped flat at every whistle, crept forward on her belly between blasts of hail, and swung wide around the outer ewes rather than pushing through the middle of the group, patiently drawing the three broken clusters back into a single trembling flock and walking them, step by careful step, towards the narrow gateway of the pen.

By the time the last ewe clattered through the hurdles, the cheer that went up from the wall was ragged with relief as much as admiration. Grace ran the last few yards and dropped to her knees in the mud beside Fern, holding the dog's wet head against her chest and saying her name over and over. Selwyn Cutter pushed through the crowd, pulling off his cap. "I'll give you three hundred pounds for her, on the spot," he said, "and no questions asked." Grace looked up at him, her eyes bright with tears she made no effort to hide, and shook her head. "She's not for sale, Selwyn. Not for three hundred, not for three thousand."

Option 1: Describe a visit to a very high place. Try to make your writing as vivid and interesting as you can.

• Use precise sensory detail to put the reader right there with you.
• Vary your sentence lengths to control the pace of your description.

Option 2: Describe an experience which was frightening. Try to make your writing as vivid and interesting as you can.

• Build the tension gradually rather than revealing everything at once.
• Show how you felt through your actions and thoughts, not just by naming the emotion.