Prelim time!

This week we thought about the prelim. Remember that you must sit paper 1, since it’s a unit assessment (unless you already have the assessments) and I would advise everyone to do the whole prelim. No pass in the prelim means no possibility of an appeal – and it’s a useful dry run for the exam.

We revised some of the standard Close Reading questions on word choice, sentence structure, imagery and so on and reminded ourselves how to do context questions (though these have varied a bit in recent years) and linking questions. Do look at the “Language Skills” book before next week; it’s basic, but useful.

We also reminded ourselves about literature answers. For the prelim, there will be questions suitable to do on “A Patchwork Planet”, “A View from the Bridge” and a couple of the poems. In the actual exam, who knows? – though it’s very very likely (no guarantees…) that there will be suitable questions on the novel and the play. The poetry is much more of a lottery – the questions are often very specific (“Choose a poem which relies on the reader’s knowledge of historic events…”). However, if there is a suitable question, the poetry ones are more straightforward.

Key for any literature essay – any Close Reading question – any exam in the world, in fact – is to answer the question. That’s it, really. Literature questions and Close Reading Analysis ones will always ask you HOW the writer has done what he/she’s done, so writing about techniques will always be expected.

The class then wrote the answers to the second obesity passage – 2006 passage 2. If you were off, you might like to do this at home and send / email it to me – this also applies if you took it home to finish. If I have it by Monday, I can mark it for Tuesday.

See you next week. We’ll try to start at 6 pm but if you arrive late, don’t worry; you can just start and get extra time at the end. For the exam in May, however, they won’t let you in late!