Week 51 · English Practice Paper

Reading Passage

Read the passage below and answer all the questions that follow.

The Northern Pack

When the grey wolf recovered from the avalanche that had split her family in half, she led fewer than a dozen of her kin north, away from the valley they had always known. For three winters they travelled, driven from one range to another by hunters and by rival packs, until at last they found the high, treeless plateau where no boundary fence or hunting trail had ever reached. Their instinct led them always upward, to the last shelf of rock before the ice began, where the wind scoured the snow thin enough to hunt beneath, and where the short summer sun blazed low across the tundra so that they slept through the brightest hours in the long blue shadows of the stones.

At dusk, when the hunger woke in them, they came down off the plateau in a long grey line, moving without a sound but for the soft fall of paw on stone. Moonlight silvered their running shapes, catching first on the broad pale scar across the shoulders of their leader. They crossed the frozen river at its narrowest point, or fanned out wide across the flat, wind-scoured plain beyond it, working the edges of the great herds of caribou whose meat, in a hard season, meant the difference between the pack's survival and its end.

It was empty country. Few humans travelled so far north, and fewer still troubled to fence in land that gave back so little in return; nor could any hunter easily follow where the pack now ranged, for the plateau's approach was guarded on every side by ground that would not hold a vehicle's weight. The pack, though never large, was unusually strong for its size, thriving where larger, softer packs further south had long since been thinned by traps and rifles.

Around the pack's denning ground stood a natural wall of broken grey stone, split into narrow, upright columns by centuries of frost, so that from a distance the whole ridge seemed to bristle like the spines of some vast sleeping creature. At the centre of the plateau, where the columns opened into a wide, sheltered hollow, stood Sable, the leader. She was smaller than many of her rivals further south, lean and dark-coated, with one ear torn ragged at the tip and a long pale scar running the length of her shoulder — the mark left by the avalanche that had claimed half her family and put her, still young, at the head of what remained.

Option 1: Imagine you were one of the people in the rowing boat, and describe the scene, your feelings and your observations as if you are that character.

• Focus closely on what your character can see, hear and feel in the moment.
• Let your character's emotions come through their thoughts and actions, not just direct statements.

Option 2: Write from the point of view of someone still aboard the sinking ship, watching the boat pull away.

• Consider what this character can and cannot do, now that the boat has left.
• Build a sense of atmosphere using the dark, the sea and the disappearing lantern light.

Option 3: Write from the point of view of someone on a nearby shore, observing the boat's lantern light approaching through the darkness.

• Think about how much this character can actually make out from a distance.
• Use the uncertainty of what they are watching to build tension in your writing.