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Pre-Junior Cycle Final Examination 2023

English
Text
(Option A)
Text

For examiner's use only

Higher Level Section and answer Marks

1.
2 hours 2.
A
3.
180 marks 4.
5.
B 6.
7.
8.
C 9.
10.
11.
D
School use only: 12.
Total
Spelling Waiver Granted

*01*
 The theme of this examination paper is
Courage and Perseverance

Instructions

There are four sections in this examination paper.

Section A Giving Thoughtful Value Judgements 60 marks 4 questions

Section B Understanding and Appreciating Character and Action in Drama 45 marks 3 questions
Section C Exploring New Worlds in Non Literary Texts 35 marks 3 questions
Section D Identifying Characteristics of Media Texts 40 marks 2 questions

Answer all 12 questions.

When answering on studied material, you must use texts in line with what is prescribed for 2023.

The questions do not all carry equal marks. The number of marks for each question is stated at the
top of the question.

You should spend about 40 minutes on Section A, 30 minutes on Section B, 25 minutes on Section
C and 20 minutes on Section D.

When answering on studied material, you must use texts in line with what is prescribed for 2023.

Write your answers in the spaces provided in this booklet. You may lose marks if you do not do so.
You are not required to use all of the space provided. You should read each question in full before
beginning your response.

Extra pages are provided if needed. Label any extra work clearly with the question number and
part.

You may only use blue or black pen when writing your answers. Do not use pencil.

This examination booklet will be scanned and your work presented to an examiner on screen.
Anything that you write outside of the answer areas may not be seen by the examiner.

*02*
 Section A Giving Thoughtful Value Judgements 60 marks

Suggested time for Section A: 40 minutes

Here is the British Poet Laureate, Simon Armitage’s, poem about the invasion of Ukraine, written in
solidarity with those under fire.

Resistance

It’s war again: a family over buckled bridges

carries its family out of a managing cases and bags,
pranged house balancing west and east -
under a burning thatch. godspeed.

The next scene smacks It’s war again: the woman in

of archive newsreel: platforms
and trains
(never again, never again),
toddlers passed
over heads and shoulders,
lifetimes stowed
in luggage racks.
It’s war again: unmistakable
smoke
on the near horizon mistaken
for thick fog. Fingers crossed.
black
gives sunflower seeds to the
soldier, insists
his marrow will nourish
the national flower. In dreams
let bullets be birds, let cluster
bombs
burst into flocks.
False news is news
with the pity
edited out. It’s war again:

An old blue tractor an air-raid siren can’t fully

tows an armoured tank mute
into no-man’s land. the cathedral bells -
let’s call that hope.
It’s the ceasefire hour:
godspeed the columns
of winter coats and fur-lined
hoods,
the high-wire walk

*03*
Question 1 (10 marks)

What symbol or image stands out to you most in this poem? Use evidence from the poem to
support your answer.

Optional Rough Work

*04*
Question 2 (10 marks)

Based on your reading of the poem, why do you think the poet has chosen to write about the
invasion of Ukraine? Include two reasons for your opinion.

Optional Rough Work

*05*
Question 3 (15 marks)

(a) Write out the line from the poem that contains each of the poetic devices listed below.
(b) Explain what the poet is trying to express to the reader in each line.

Metaphor

(a)

(b)

Rhyme

(a)

(b)

Alliteration

(a)

(b)

*06*
Question 4 (25 marks)

Simon Armitage aims to get the readers or listeners of the poem to have an emotional connection
with his poem. Choose a poem you have studied that you have an emotional connection to.

(a) Describe the emotion you experienced when reading the poem.

Optional Rough Work

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(b) Discuss how the language and imagery used by the poet impacted on your emotional response.

Optional Rough Work

*08*
 Section B Understanding and Appreciating Character and Action in Drama
45 marks

Suggested time for Section B: 30 minutes

This excerpt is from the play adaptation

of the novel To Kill a Mockingbird by
Harper Lee. The play tells us the story of
a lawyer, Atticus Finch, who is defending
an innocent black man, Tom Robinson,
for the rape of a white girl. Scout is the
nine-year-old daughter of Atticus and
she is accompanied by her friend and
neighbour, Dill, who is seven years old.
They have been at the trial unbeknownst
to her father and have left the courtroom
as Dill is upset. The children meet a local
man called Dolphus Raymond, who
explains the situation to them.

Scout: Dill, come on out under the trees. Heat got you, I expect.
Dill: It was just him I couldn’t stand.
Scout: Who, Tom?
Dill: That old Mr. Gilmer doin’ him that a way, talking so hateful to him—
Scout: Dill, that’s his job. Why, if we didn’t have prosecutors—well, we couldn’t have defense
attorneys, I reckon.
Dill: I know all that, Scout. It was the way he said it made me sick, plain sick.
Scout: He was supposed to act that way, Dill, he was cross—
Dill: He didn’t act that way when—
Scout: Dill, those were his own witnesses.
Dill: Well, Mr. Finch didn’t act that way to Mayella and old man Ewell when he cross-examined
them. The way that man called him ‘boy’ all the time and sneered at him, an’ looked around at the
jury every time he answered—
Scout: Well, Dill, after all he’s just a Negro.
Dill: I don’t care one speck. It ain’t right. Somehow it ain’t right to do ‘em that way. Hasn’t anybody
got any business talkin’ like that—it just makes me sick.
Scout: That’s just Mr. Gilmer’s way, Dill, he does ‘em all that way. You’ve never seen him get good
‘n down on one yet. Why, when—well, today Mr. Gilmer seemed to me like he wasn’t half trying.
They do ‘em all that way, most lawyers I mean.
Dill: Mr. Finch doesn’t.
Scout: He’s not an example, Dill. He’s—he’s the same in the courtroom as he is on the public
streets.
Dill: That’s not what I mean.

*09*
Dolphus: I know what you mean, boy. (Mr. Dolphus Raymond peered around the trunk at us). You
aren’t thinhided, it just makes you sick, doesn’t it? Come on round here, son, I got something
that’ll settle your stomach. Here, take a good sip. It’ll quieten you.
Dolphus: Hee, hee.
Scout: Dill, you watch out now.
Dill: Scout, it’s nothin’ but Coca-Cola.
Dolphus: You little folks won’t tell on me now, will you? It’d ruin my reputation if you did.
Scout: You mean all you drink in that sack’s Coca-Cola? Just plain Coca-Cola?
Dolphus: Yes, ma’am. That’s all I drink most of the time.
Scout: Then you just pretend you’re half—? I beg your pardon, sir. I didn’t mean to be—(Dolphus
chuckles to himself). Why do you do like you do?
Dolphus: Wh—oh yes, you mean why do I pretend? Well, it’s simple. Some folks don’t—like the
way I live. Now, I could say the hell with ‘em, I don’t care if they don’t like it. I do say I don’t care if
they don’t like it, right enough—but I don’t say the hell with ‘em, see?
Dill and Scout: No, sir.
Dolphus: I try to give ‘em a reason, you see. It helps folks if they can latch onto a reason. When I
come to town, which is seldom, if I weave a little and drink out of this sack, folks can say “Dolphus
Raymond’s in the clutches of whiskey—that’s why he don’t change his ways. He can’t help himself,
that’s why he lives the way he does.”
Scout: That ain’t honest, Mr. Raymond, makin’ yourself out badder’n you are already—
Dolphus: It ain’t honest but it’s mighty helpful to folks. Secretly, Miss Finch, I’m not much of a
drinker, but you see they could never, never understand that I live like I do because that’s the way I
want to live.
Scout: Why are you telling us all this?
Dolphus: Because you’re children and you can understand it, and because I heard that one. (he
jerks his head at Dill)—things haven’t caught up with that one’s instinct yet. Let him get a little
older and he won’t get sick and cry. Maybe things’ll strike him as being—not quite right, say, but he
won’t cry, not when he gets a few years on him.
Dill: Cry about what, Mr. Raymond?
Dolphus: Cry about the simple hell people give other people—without even thinking. Cry about
the hell white people give colored people, without even stopping to think they’re people too.
Scout: Atticus says cheatin’ a colored man is ten times worse than cheatin’ a white man. Says it’s
the worst thing you can do.
Dolphus: I don’t reckon it’s—Miss Jean Louise, you don’t know your Pa’s not a run-of-the-mill man,
it’ll take a few years for that to sink in—you haven’t seen enough of the world yet. You haven’t
even seen this town, but all you gotta do is step back inside the courthouse.
Scout: C’mon Dill. You all right now?
Dill: Yeah. Glad t’ve metcha, Mr. Raymond, and thanks for the drink, it was mighty settlin’.
Scout: Shoot, we missed it. Atticus is halfway through his speech to the jury.

*10*
Question 5 (10 marks)

What does Dolphus Raymond tell us about the character of Atticus Finch? Support your response
with evidence from the drama.

Optional Rough Work

*11*
Question 6 (15 marks)

Based on your reading of this play, explain two things that a director could do to stage this extract
in an imaginative way. You may refer to:

● Lighting
● Movement
● Props
● Costumes
● Characterisation
● Technologies to project imagery
● Or any other ideas that could help with staging.

Optional Rough Work

*12*
Question 7 (20 marks)

Scout and Dill learn that appearances can be deceptive; that things are not always as they seem.
They realise that Dolphus Raymond is projecting an image of himself as a drunk but they learn that
this is not the case.
Choose a character from your studied drama that has a realisation about the world they live in.
Describe a key moment in which they have to take action about something they have learned, and
outline what happened because of that action.

Name of Character:

Key Moment:

Optional Rough Work

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*14*
 Section C Exploring New Worlds in Non Literary Texts 35 marks

Suggested time for Section C: 25 minutes

The following extract is taken from travel writer Rosita

Boland’s “Elsewhere”, which reveals how exploring
the world, and those we meet along the way, can
dramatically shape the course of a person’s life. In this
extract, Rosita recounts a death-defying bus journey
through Pakistan.

Pakistan, 1995

After a few days spent exploring Karimabad, Baltit and

Gulmit, I took the nice bus back to Gilgit. Through some
grapevine process, Muhammad had known I’d made it
safely to Karimabad. He was still a bit mad at me.‘ Crazy! You crazy, Rosita!’ He scolded me, while
getting my rucksack out of the cupboard, where it had been stored in my absence. My former
room was still empty. He carried my rucksack across the garden. ‘Where you go next?’ He looked
back at me warily, wondering what new unsuitable plan I was scheming. ‘ Skardu,’ I said. ‘Don’t
worry, Muhammad, I’m going to take the bus there.’
Skardu, the capital of Baltistan, is 170 kilometres south-east of Gilgit. I was still enthralled by the
vertical landscape of the Karakoram, and wanted to spend more time among the mountains.
Expeditions started out to K2 from Skardu. I had a vague idea in my head of absorbing some sense
of the possibilities of adventure just by being there. My guidebook told of incredible scenery,
and villages untouched by modernity. An air route to Islamabad had only been established in the
1960s. The road I was about to travel, the Indus Highway, was completed in 1985. The knowledge
that it was only a decade since Baltistan had had a road to connect it with the wider world was
somehow intoxicating. This was not a world I knew anything about.
Two days later, I was aboard the local bus from Gilgit to Skardu. I had said goodbye to Muhammad
a second time, telling him I’d be back in a week or ten days. This time, though, I took my rucksack.
One thing I had learned in northern Pakistan was that the word ‘Highway’ bore no relation to
what I knew as highways. The further we travelled along the grandly named Indus Highway, the
less it even resembled a road, far less a broad and surfaced piece of infrastructure. We were on
an unsurfaced track, which had no protective barriers, and the track was now following the Indus
River. Not alongside it, but far, far above: hundreds of metres above the gorge.
Slowly, the road began to take on the sensation of fiction. It was literally carved out of the side of
a mountain gorge. From where I sat, in my unluckily scenic right-hand seat, the bus appeared to
be levitating in thin air, so narrow was the road, and so close were the wheels to its bare edge.
Far above us on the left, the gorge walls extended upwards hundreds of metres to a strip of sky as
defined and narrow as a runway. We started to hit the hairpin bends, the bus labouring and the
brakes screeching as we rounded each dreadful turn. I stared transfixed out the window. I did not
want to believe my eyes. The landscape was almost savage in its nightmarish beauty. I was barely
able to comprehend its vast, surreal scale. Outlandish, I thought. Not of this world.

*15*
Among the dark shadows cast by the mountain walls, and the black of the stone, the villages of
Thowar and Basho glowed with the luminosity of tiny chips of emeralds. From their location in the
gorge, I realised, the people in those villages would never see either sunrise or sunset. The sky was
a strip between the walls of the gorge high above. The only time sunlight would hit the villages
was when the sun was directly overhead. I thought of the children who had gestured to me. What
was it like to live in a landscape that was vertical, and where there were no horizons? I imagined
them growing up fearless of vertigo, playing their games on those tightropes of land, dreaming of
someday seeing the sky in its entirety. It kept my mind off the road for at least five minutes.
‘Not good,’ a man beside me said, twisting into the aisle to look. “Why?’ I said immediately, my
heart beginning to beat faster. ‘We cannot wait here long,’ he explained. ‘We are still four hours
from Skardu. The driver has to get to Skardu before dark. He cannot drive this road in the dark.’
The bus driver got out and conferred with some men, indicating a small gap they had opened up
between the rock-fall and the very edge of the track. In rising terror, I saw that he intended to try
and get the bus through this space, which looked no wider than a wheelbarrow. The driver got on
again, and revved up. Everyone fell silent. I had never been on an Asian bus before where everyone
suddenly stopped talking; in itself, a deeply unsettling sign. It was not just my palms that were
clammy, but my spine, all the way up to my neck. The bus jerked forward. The driver drove on to
the pile of rocks on the left side of the cleared space; the gorge lay below on the right. The bus
was now tilted at an angle of about 35 degrees towards the gorge, and, apart from the supplies
that had been offloaded at Thowar and Basho, many sacks of cargo remained tied to the roof. We
edged forward. The bus groaned, struggling with gravity.
In those moments, I truly believed death was imminent. I was paralysed with terror; fearing the
wheels’ loss of purchase, and the freefall of the bus into the gorge below. I was utterly overtaken
by a sensation of horror and impending disaster. I thought I was going to black out. I closed my
eyes. I couldn’t look out the window any longer. In those moments, when I believed we were all
at risk of dying, scenes from my life did not flash before me. I did not see Jake’s face, or anyone’s
face: the image that came into my head was the wholly banal one of the unfinished cup of coffee
I had left behind at the Madina earlier that day, because I was running late; an image that seemed
to me now had come from another, different world that had existed before I had got on the bus.
Then all four wheels of the bus thumped down together. There followed another four hours in this
terrible journey. I lay against the window, stunned at simply being alive. The bus stopped at an
army checkpoint. Painted on a gable wall in large faded white letters, five words in English spelt a
surreal, arcane* greeting to Balistan. They read: Welcome to the World Without.

Glossary
Arcane = Dark/Forbidding

*16*
Question 8 (5 marks)

Match the words closest to their meaning by writing A, B or C in the box provided.

1. Enthralled

A. Bored
B. Fascinated
C. Undivided

2. Levitating

A. Settling
B. Resting
C. Hovering

3. Outlandish

A. Plain
B. Outrageous
C. Ordinary

4. Luminosity

A. Concealing
B. Gloomy
C. Dazzling

5. Imminent

A. Advancing
B. Unlikely
C. Doomed

*17*
Question 9 (10 marks)

In your opinion, is Rosita Boland courageous or foolish or neither in this diary extract? Give two
reasons for your response.

*18*
Question 10 (20 marks)

Rosita Boland has become an avid fan of traveling around the world and writing about the
experiences and the people she meets on her journeys.
You have decided to go on an adventure of your own. Write a blog about your experience,
including information about your destination, the people you meet, and the things you see and do
there. (Write a least three blog entries).

Optional Rough Work

*19*
*20*
 Section D Identifying Characteristics of Media Texts 40 marks

Suggested time for Section D: 20 minutes

Examine the following two television advertisements carefully.

Advertisement A

Advertisement B

*21*
Question 11 (15 marks)

Based on your examination of both advertisements, which image tells you more about the story, the
characters, or the genre (type) of the programme? Give two reasons for your response.

Optional Rough Work

*22*
Question 12 (25 marks)

As protagonists, both Loki and Ms Marvel face challenges that ultimately influence the plot of their
story.
Identify the main protagonist or antagonist of your studied film, and using at least two key
moments, explain how they influenced the plot of the film.

Name of film:

Name of protagonist or antagonist:

Optional Rough Work

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*24*
Additional writing space. Label all work clearly with the question number and part.

*25*
Additional writing space. Label all work clearly with the question number and part.

*26*
Blank Page

*27*
*W4FC*

Acknowledgements

“Resistance” by Simon Armitage www.simonarmitage.com/wp-content/uploads/Resistance-by-

Simon-Armitage.pdf

Image from British Library of Jug. www.twitter.com/DigiArchaeo/status/1507334641421852682

Excerpt from “To Kill A Mockingbird” Play, The Trial Scene. www.cbsd.org/cms/lib/PA01916442/
Centricity/Domain/1611/trial%20script%20TKM.pdf

Still from “To Kill a Mockingbird” play, West End. www.playbill.com/article/read-the-reviews-for-

rafe-spall-in-to-kill-a-mockingbird-in-londons-west-end

Excerpt from Rosita Boland’s “Elsewhere”. www.penguin.co.uk/articles/2019/05/elsewhere-rosita-

boland-extract

Image of “Elsewhere” text. www.rte.ie/culture/2019/0701/1059518-elsewhere-by-rosita-boland-

read-an-extract/

Advertisement for Loki. www.rottentomatoes.com/tv/loki/s01

Advertisement for Ms Marvel. www.flipgeeks.com/entertainment/brand-new-marvel-studios-ms-

marvel-has-just-arrived

*28*