2.

3 Practice Questions Non-fiction Texts

Text A: Extract from the book How to Watch a Game of Rugby
After reading Text A below, answer the questions on the next page.

Extract from the book How to Watch a Game of Rugby

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When I taught at St Patricks College, Silverstream, I was told that a

good rugby school is a good school. This assertion that there is a moral
dimension to rugby is not as banal as it seems. Rugby is a manly game.
You play for your team. You take your knocks, give as hard as you
receive, but you do not do anything underhand. You dont pass to
someone in a worse position than yourself. You take the tackle yourself, if
necessary. You play the ball, not the man.
The erratic bounce of the ball gives rugby an anarchical aspect. You
never know precisely what will happen next. The round ball in soccer, for
instance, has an inevitability about the way it rolls, thereby reducing the
element of luck and unpredictability in the game. But no rugby
movement is exactly the same because of the contrariness of the ball,
which scuttles and wheels like a tiny terrier doing somersaults. This
contrariness mirrors the contrariness of life. Rugby teaches you to accept
lifes bounce of the ball. The rugby watcher learns to take the bad and
the unfair with the good and the fair. Winning is important. But accepting
defeat graciously is also (or should be) the mark of a rugby supporter.
For some people, these values are as limited as the lines that mark out
the rugby paddock. But, simple though they are, I believe they have an
integrity and honesty about them, and that generations of rugby
players and rugby watchers trying to live by these principles have
contributed to the generally decent nature of our society. As Denis
Welch once pointed out in an editorial in the New Zealand Listener:
Rugby remains one of the great games, perhaps precisely because it
totally involves the body, not just the feet, or a stick or a racquet. Is
there any sporting thrill in the world to equal that of a try? There are
qualities like unselfishness and unpretentiousness that distinguish it
from flashier rivals
Playing and watching rugby was our religion. The grounds where we
watched the tests were our cathedrals. The paddocks where we watched
our local teams play were our chapels. The best players were our saints
and the opposition thugs were our sinners.
Referees who gave penalties against our sides were devils. The cry of
Black! Black!
Black! emanating from the stands and terraces in great roars of sound
was New Zealands prayer.
From the thousands of accounts gleaned from memory, newspaper
columns, books on rugby and, more recently, television interviews, we
know hundreds of personal stories.

They have been created for over 100 years now by generations of
watchers of rugby, and are the catechism of the rugby religion. For many
generations, they have also defined what being a New Zealander is. But
no longer, perhaps. I have the feeling that the claim that
New Zealanders know everything about rugby cannot be sustained.
Kids dont have to play rugby as they did when I was a youngster. Other
sports and interests have grabbed the attention of the younger
generations.
I would argue that New Zealanders have lost something. A revival of the
old-time religion of watching rugby is needed.
Published by Mary Varnham Publishers, Wellington, 2004.

Text A: Extract from the book How to Watch a Game of Rugby

1. Analyse how the writer develops the ideas of these principles (lines 17-18).
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2. Analyse how the writer develops and builds up to the ideas of the last
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Text B: The wonderful bike (Abridged newspaper column)

After reading Text B, answer the questions on the next page.

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The wonderful bike

Of all the endless multiplicity of things that I wouldnt have invented,
the thing that I most wouldnt have invented is the bicycle. But Mr Bike
did. He took two wheels and sat people astride them.

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What gave him that notion? How did it enter his sick little head that it
would be possible to balance the thing? Yet not only is it possible, its
easy, so easy that its become a simile for easiness. Its like riding a
bike, we say of anything so simple that once learned, it is never
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Mr Bike discovered a latent human capacity for travelling by buttock.

Because balancing a bike is the business of making a series of minute
buttock-shifts relative to the position of the bike frame. And we do it
with ease, without thought, as if theres a separate mind down there, a
sort of pre-reptilian cortex in the bodys basement that lay dormant for
centuries until Mr Bike rolled up and nudged it awake with the words
your cyclist needs you. None of that would have occurred to me even
under torture. But that it occurred to mad Mr Bike was, and continues to
be, the greatest of all boons to a thousand million children.

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The bike is the first swig of freedom, for not only does your first bike
snap the apron strings and expand the as-yet uninvented atlas of your
world, but it also snaps the rules of motion. Who doesnt recall freewheeling down the steepest slope in the world-the one just around the
corner from your house, the one that you barely notice today in your
purring Japanese sedan, but that was the Everest of childhood, freewheeling down at that speed so terror-inducingly great that you could
glimpse, just ahead of you, round the bend, the tail feathers of
tomorrow? And all done sitting down. Who doesnt remember that?

The bike is a wonder beyond words. It is silent, cheap, efficient,

healthy, simple, mendable. Its transport for saints. But the clouds of
glory, as Wordsworth was fond of pointing out, tend to burn off in the
fierce sun of adulthood. We graduate to the car, which is silent, cheap,
efficient, healthy, simple, mendable and transport for saints with an
enormous not in front of all of them.
And yet those good, wise adults who stick with the bike all wear a badge
of crankiness. The green-voting wearer of cable-knit sweaters. The selfflagellating German couple pedalling across the Mackenzie in a norwester, their faces writhing like sacks of snakes. The muttering wino
pushing his bike through the city centre, the handlebars hung with
plastic bags full of plastic bags. And the racing cyclists with their bums
encased in a lycra that is nuder than nudity. All seem to have a touch of
the asylum.
And yet, as I have said, the bike is in every way a good thing, one of the
greatest inventions that I didnt invent. If we all reverted to the bike the
world would be better in a hundred ways-less pollution, less obesity,
less noise, less death, less frustration, and a whole lot more room on the
road for me and my car, which I also would never have invented.

Text B: The wonderful bike (Abridged newspaper column)

1. Analyse how the writer uses language techniques to relate his ideas to the
reader.
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2. Analyse how the writer use humour in paragraphs to communicate his ideas.
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2.3 Practice Questions Prose Texts

After reading Text C below, answer the questions on the next page.

Text C: The Wait

Silence. Dead silence. Hear the clock ticking. Click clock click clock. So
monotonous, so dull, so heavy. Two strangers sit across the waiting room.
Routine visit. An old married couple. Monthly medicine, weekly injection?
None of my business. Probably..
Whats the time? Tick tock tick tock. Hurry up! Need to get out of here, need
to get out of here. Sick to the stomach, saliva creeps into my mouth. Must be
nervous-or is there another reason? No, no, no, no, no. The old couples eyes
are creepy. I bet theyre wondering why Im here. Well, its none of their damn
business, and they can keep their wrinkly eyes off me.
Damn it! The suspense in here is incredible. Need to go, neeeeed to go.
All around the walls are covered with posters. Cancer, unwanted pregnancy,
STDs, meningitis. I hate to be reminded of such gross things. Yuck! How

depressing. This place sucks with its plain bogey walls covered with its
hideous morbid posters.
This place is damn silent. The only sound is the tick tock of the ugly clock, the
tap tap of a keyboard, and cars speeding past. Oh, to be able to speed away
in one of them! A Ferrari or a pink Cadillac would be good to take me far, far
away from my mess of a life, to a beautiful castle with a handsome prince
and my very own gorgeous garden.
But that is just a fairy tale. Life never happens that way. The sound of the old
man clearing his throat brings me back to this dense place. The tension in
here is insane.
A lady pushes a pram past me. Salty tears come to my eyes but, luckily, dont
manage to escape. Fear and panic replace the unformed tears. Faster and
faster my heart beats, like when hearing on your marks, get set right
before a race at primary school. Now its beating so fast, I cant keep up with
it. Focus, need to focus. Dad calls from the sidelines, Youll be fine, sweetie.
I need him here to say that again but that could never happen. He can never
know about my visit. Not ever! A voice disrupts the thoughts, Mr and Mrs
Foster? The doctor is here to se you. Thump thump. Thump thump. That was
my heart. The old couple get up and go into the lethal room.
Funny how closed doors can hold the story of a life. My head is spinning-the
green walls keep going around and around. Brown chairs, creepy posters
popping out, huge pram, drugged lady, green walls, brown chairs. Over and
over again. Then I hear a voice.
Kirsten Reeves? I look up.
Shes ready to see you now.
Okay, okay deep breaths. I will be all right. I can do this. After all, I did win all
my races
didnt I?
Only just.
Ruby Little, Year 13, Hagley Community College, Christchurch.

Text C: The Wait

1. Analyse how tension is built up by the writer.
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2. Analyse how the writer helps the reader understand the girls thoughts
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After reading Text D below, answer the questions on the next page.

Text D: Imagine a small town (extract from New Zealand

novel)
Imagine a small town
Along its edges, chaos.
To the east, clinking shelves of shingle and a tearing sea, surging in from South
America across thousands of gull-studded, white-capped heaving miles.
To the south, the worn hump of a volcano crewcut with pines dark and silent, but
dimpled still on the crest where melted rock and fire have spilled to the sea to
hiss and set as solid bubbles, black threaded with red.
To the west, a border of hilly terraces built up from layer upon layer of shells
which rose once, dripping from the sea and could as easily shudder like the fish
it is in legend and dive.
To the north flat paddocks pockmarked with stone, and the river which made
them shifting restlessly from channel to channel in its broad braided bed.
Nothing is sure.
The town pretends of course, settled rump-down on the coastal plain with its
back to the sea, which creeps up yearly a nibble here, a bite there, until a whole
football field has gone at the boys high school and the cliff walkway crumbles
and the sea demands propitiation, truckloads of rubble and concrete blocks. And
the town inches away in neat rectangular steps up the flanks of the volcano
which the council named after an early mayor, a lardy mutton-chop of a man,
hoping to tame it as Greeks thought theyd fool the Furies by calling them the
Kindly Ones: inches away across shingle bar and flax swamp to the shell
terraces and over, where order frays at last into unpaved roads, creeks flowing
like black oil beneath willows tangled in convolvulus, and old villa houses, gaptoothed, teetering on saggy piles, with an infestation of hens in the yard and a
yellow toothed dog chained to a water tank.
At the centre, things seem under control. The post office is a white wedding
cake, scalloped and frilled, and across the road are the banks putting on a
responsible Greek front (though ramshackle corrugated iron behind). At each
end of the main street, the town mourns its glorious dead with a grieving soldier

in puttees to the north and a defiant lion to the south, and in between, a cohort
of memorial elms was drawn up respectfully until 1952 when it was discovered
that down in the dark the trees had broken ranks and were rootling around
under the road tearing crevices in the tarmac and the council was forced to be
stern: tore out the lot and replaced them with plots of more compliant African
marigolds. There are shops and petrol stations and churches and flowering
cherries for beautification and a little harbour with a tea kiosk in the lee of the
volcano. Its as sweet as a nut, as neat as a pie, as a pin.
Imagine it.
Source: The Skinny Louie Book, (Penguin), by Fiona Farrell, Winner of New
Zealand Prime Ministers Award for Fiction, 2007.

Text D: Imagine a small town (extract from New Zealand

novel)
1. Analyse how the writer develops the ideas raised in the sentence Along its
edges, chaos (paragraph 2).
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2. Analyse different ways the writer shows us that The town pretends, of course
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2.3 Practice Questions Poetry

Text E: Hydroslide
After reading Text E below, answer the questions on the next page.
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The shadows of little dark bodies

are flying downwards, looping and tumbling
like spinning X-rays of the water chutes

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long yellow arm. Two calm girls, you walk

straight up to it, climb in to the cavernous
maw* ready, eager to be devoured then spat out
by that angular, helter-skelter,
hit-and-miss streaking cascade. Tell me,
once in, are you at all the movers,

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being moved, in that thrusting propulsion?

Is it all one, the power and the loss of it?
Do you ride to your glory by throwing

yourselves away? Intricate splayed-out

little fliers, I watch you emerge, stroll out
from your fearful insect ecstasy, casually
peel off a new ticket; so youre condemned
and incited, so you take off over and over
on your high, mad flight from the world.
By Lauris Edmond
[*maw - stomach]

From Scenes from a Small City, Daphne Brasell Associates Publishers, Wellington, 1994)

Text E: Hydroslide
1. Analyse the idea(s) behind the three questions in the poem. Tell me yourselves
away? (lines 8-13).
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2. Analyse how the poet uses poetic techniques in the poem to develop and support
the insect image (line 15).
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Text F: Our Trip to Takaka

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After reading Text F below, answer the questions on the next page.
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Our Trip to Takaka

Well, we went to Takaka

for the weekend
and there was this spring.
Yes.
This spring.
And we could see under the
water with this mirror thing.
And there was this eel.
Yes.
This eel, swimming from right
to left like a reel of silk ribbon,
like a pennant waving.
You know: a pennant,
with teeth and an eye like a
silver stud among all this
pondweed. And there were
all these bubbles. Each one
was like a little world
rising in its sleek skin.
And then we went to see

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the goldfields.
Yes.
Goldfields.
And there were these caves
in scrubland. Theyd stripped
the hills till the ground ran red.
And we went into one of the
caves and there was this young
man sleeping on fern fronds,
meditating to make the world
well. He had his dog with him.
Yes.
His dog.
Thats how we knew he was there.
The cave was deep, like an ear.
Or a belly button. It was deep and
damp, and we heard the dog bark
down in the dark and a young man
saying, Be quiet!
The clay in the cave stuck

to our hands like dry blood.

We gave the young man a
bread roll.
Yes.
A bread roll.
With cheese and egg. And we
said, Well, good luck with the
meditating and everything.

He said, yeah, well, he was

going to give it his best shot.
Then we drove home.
Yes.
Home.
That was our trip to Takaka.

by Fiona Farrell

Fiona Farrell, Trout. [www.trout.auckland.ac.nz], 2003

Text F: Our Trip to Takaka

1. Analyse how language features are used to establish the mood of the poem.
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2. Analyse how language features have been used to suggest that it is a young
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