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BBA PRACTICE EXAMINATION

2013
ENGLISH
Level Three
RESOURCE BOOKLET
91474 (3.3)
Respond critically to signicant aspects of unfamiliar written texts
through close reading, supported by evidence.
Credits: Four
Suggested time: 60 minutes
Refer to this booklet to answer the questions for English 91474 (3.3)
Check that this booklet has pages 2-3 and that none of these pages is blank.
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STUDENTS NAME

BBA Educational Resources 2013

HAND THIS BOOKLET TO THE SUPERVISOR AT THE END OF THE ASSESSMENT.
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Text A: A Tale of two Mice (prose)
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Time passes and things change.
I remember with sunlight clarity waking on a sofa twenty years ago with a regulation hangover. Half
awake I watched as the sun pierced the dirty windows, sidled across the room and lit a vast second-hand tv
with an indoor aerial, a tubular chrome chair, a wrong-height table, and a mouse.
A mouse the same colour as the carpet. And I lay still to watch it. It was aware of my presence but
not as a life form. I was furniture. I was terrain. It was alert but not nervous, a tiny suburban antelope on the
carpets Serengeti. The mouse disappeared not when I moved, but at the exact moment when I decided that
I would move.
By the time I had used someones toothbrush, drunk a pint of water and made an instant coffee and
returned to the vinyl the day was dirtily under way and the mouse a memory, a dawn encounter that had felt
like a strange privilege. A communion of sorts. Something truly good. That, as I say, was 20 years ago.
The memory bubbled up last week because a woman sent me a mousetrap. She comes from
Whangarei and kind Mrs Whangarei had heard me on the radio saying that I was battling mice.
I always know when theres a mouse in the house because the cat stares at the fridge. It can stare
at the fridge for hours. Mice get behind the fridge because they can nd house-crud. House-crud is hair and
toenails, grease and crumbs. And while the mouse frolics in the crud the cat sits attent with its tail wrapped
around its base like a draught excluder.
Across the back of the fridge theres a sort of lattice. I can only guess at its purpose but to a mouse
its a climbing frame. During the night the mouse hillaries up the lattice and onto the roof of the world and
nds bread and cheese. The breads in a plastic bag, the cheese in a mousetrap. My mousetrap serves as
a feeding station. Every other morning I have found a bare trap, ravaged bread, a dandruff of droppings and
the cat still staring at the Kelvinator.
Until, that is, Mrs Whangarei sent me her dread engine. It is called The Better Mousetrap. I presume
that the factory that makes this trap is easy to nd because the world will have beaten a path to its door. The
trap is made of grey plastic, admirably simple in design and as touchy as a feminist.
I baited it last night and went to bed. In the morning the cat was asleep on the sofa. On the oor a
blob of mouse innards. On the fridge a triggered mousetrap. In the mousetrap a spread mouse. Its back end
looked like the ragged end of a blunderbuss. The mouse had not had time to assume a look of surprise.
And it seems to me that these two stories illustrate, more clearly than anything else I could write, the
gap between youth and middle age.
By Joe Bennett
A Tale of Two Mice (adapted), from Laugh? I could have cried, Joe Bennett, p 141-3,
Harper Collins, (NZ) Ltd, Auckland 2008
A Tale of Two Mice
TEXT A
Refer to Text A to answer Questions One and Three.
You are advised to spend 60 minutes answering the questions in this booklet.
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The cat does a ne patriarchal stalk
his paws all rosebuds and thorns,
eyes a tender-censorious almost-blue
as he plays pat-a-cake, pat-a-cake
with the living room rug
which bubbles and bumps
like bread dough baking
until I lift its edge
to see a small, dark, anguished mouse
race the thread of its tail up and down
like a seamstress frantic to say least and mend soonest
the deep rift in time the cats mood gouges.
And now, and again now, the cat leaps victorious,
hurtles the mouse across the oor:
shes a dainty stunned spool of nerves and blood,
her sequin-sized heart would t on a ngertip
and beats fast as an edge-ipped coin,
the glittering of her minikin eyes
says terror plunges through her
in two black pins
and tells me, mute but clear,
that once upon seventy-ve million years ago
we sprung (crept and hid) from one lost common ancestor.
And so as if she is a Thumbelina-Cinderella
in kohl-black eyeliner and gothic velvet coat,
I spirit her up and over the windowsill
out into the darkened garden that sways in the wind
like a boat briey anchored;
she stumbles once, rouses,
then see, see how she runs:
free and easy, heel-kicking,
midnights ship-deck dance
safer than houses
for some little sisters.
by Emma Neale
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Bad Housekeeping
Text B: Bad Housekeeping (poem)
Refer to Text B to answer Questions Two and Three.
TEXT B
Bad Housekeeping, Emma Neale, Takahe 77, Christchurch,
December, 2012, http://www.takahe.org.nz
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BBA Educational Resources 2013