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Level 2 English, 2011
90380 Read unfamiliar texts and analyse the ideas
and language features
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November 2011
Credits: Three
RESOURCE BOOKLET
Refer to this booklet to answer the questions for English 90380.
Check that this booklet has pages 2 – 5 in the correct order and that none of these pages is blank.
YOU MAY KEEP THIS BOOKLET AT THE END OF THE EXAMINATION.
© New Zealand Qualifications Authority, 2011. All rights reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced by any means without the prior permission of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority.
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TEXT A: Written text (autobiography)
This is an extract from the prologue to an autobiography in which the writer describes her childhood in
Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria, in the 1980s. At that time, Bulgaria was a closed totalitarian state, meaning
that the politcal leaders attempted to maintain complete control over all aspects of people’s lives.
“I went into the woods …”
As children growing up in Communist Bulgaria, we played a pantomime game called “I
went into the woods”. It goes like this: I went into the woods, I shuffled the leaves, I found a
picture of … Then you mime the thing that you found, and the others have to name it. Simple
yet devilishly hard. Because anything could lurk under the leaves, from a mushroom to a
dead body, and usually, it did.
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Totalitarian regimes are not interested in personal stories, they are interested in the Party,
the People, and the Bright Future. Nor are post-totalitarian democracies. They are too busy
staying alive.
Equally, in the West there hangs about a vague idea of collective life behind the Iron Curtain,
and life after it, but there are surprisingly few personal stories to go with the idea. There
ought to be more. After all, half of Europe lived on ‘the other side’ for half a century. And
perhaps half of that half (by my own rough estimate) still feels as if it’s living on the other
side of something in the shape of a wall. The ghost of the Wall won’t go away until it is laid
to rest. This book is, among other things, my own act of exorcism.
In 1990, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, I left Sofia for Britain, New Zealand, and again Britain,
occasionally stopping in France and Germany for a year or so. In the process, I acquired lots
of visas, one passport, some half-wasted lives, and an impressive collection of delusions.
My chief delusion was that by becoming deeply absorbed by every other country on the
planet except Bulgaria (which I carefully tiptoed around as if it was a ticking bomb in the
shape of a country ready to detonate at the slightest touch of memory) I could get rid of
two things. One, my Bulgarian past, which was not of the miserable variety but bothered
me nevertheless, like an infirm relative calling out from a darkened room at the back of the
house. Two, the need to answer directly the question nice people ask when they meet you:
so, where are you from?
Source: Kapka Kassabova, Street Without a Name: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria (North Shore: Penguin
Books, 2008), pp 1– 2.
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TEXT B: Written text (poetry)
This poem uses a “mechanical” perspective to express a sense of frustration about life and relationships.
ratchet and clank
Give me a machine world
The clink of gears and the greased slide of running parts.
Flashing buttons like tacky stars
And green read-out screens.
Give me binary choices: Yes or No, Left or Right
To be or not to be.
Give me plotted routes, synthesized flavours, debugging procedures.
A world of rules and logic,
Backdoors and loop holes
I want Inspector Gadget arms.
Give me robotic men who speak pre-programmed lines:
Did. It. Hurt. When. You. Fell. From. Heaven?
Give me BarryWhite.exe
And engine oil in an ice bucket.
I want to admire your circuits, your perfectly formed fan belt, your
Enormous data banks.
Give me conversations in numbers and
Music in the hum of processors.
Give me the perfectly calculated turning
Of the celestial spheres, the
Exact angles of the orbiting moon, the
Soft sigh of metal in motion.
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Give me a machine world.
Glossed word
Barry White An American singer of romantic songs
Source: Alex Walls, ‘ratchet and clank’, http://nzpoetsonline.homestead.com/AW26.html (accessed 30 May, 2011).
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TEXT C: Visual text (advertising poster)
This is an advertisement for Mental Health Awareness Week 2010.
Translation of the Māori text
“Let the sun’s rays shine on us, and give us its strength / essence, so that we may find sustenance
and flourish in this world.”
Source: http://lupavision.net/lupa/2010/10/21/mental-health-awareness-week-poster/ (accessed 30 May, 2011).
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TEXT D: Oral text (speech)
This is an extract from the 2010 Lincoln University “State of the Nation’s Environment” speech given by
Al Morrison, Director-General of the Department of Conservation.
Building Biodiversity: Building New Zealand
The appeal of nature is intrinsic. Nature has value in itself. Value that does not owe its
being to our presence or our intervention. Nature’s moral dimension. Value that we reach
for when seeking inspiration, solitude, cultural meaning, spirituality … value that takes us
beyond our inflated sense of significance and puts us in our place in the scale of things.
The Millennium Ecosystem Assessment—a global audit of the world’s forests, wetlands
and other ecosystems—found that ecosystems have declined more rapidly and extensively
over the last 50 years than at any other comparable time in human history.
We are degrading ecosystems and destroying species to a point where the services that
nature provides, that we rely on for our sustenance, and that determine our prosperity, are
being run down and out.
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If we are to save ourselves from ourselves, then appealing to the intrinsic value of nature is
not enough. It is not a matter of giving up that sense of awesome wonder, but rather adding
to that an argument designed to compel the uncommitted.
Professor Tim Jackson, Economics Commissioner for the UK Sustainable Development
Commission, defines prosperity as “our ability to flourish as human beings—within the
ecological limits of a finite planet”.
It is a definition that brings us face to face with the reality that the ecological services we
rely on to survive and thrive—the quality of our air, the amount of water, the stability of
soil, the supply of fibre, the pollination of plants, the functioning of nutrient cycles, and so
on—are not limitless.
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Where to start?
We have always defined ourselves as people of the land—the land of the long white cloud,
Aotearoa New Zealand. We seek to tread lightly on that land, albeit too often in a clumsy
way. Our cultural identity, emotional being, and spirituality are linked to the landscape.
We are rich in natural capital, and that is the advantage point we must work from.
Reporting on the research in the Listener, Jane Clifton wrote: “New Zealanders’ sense of selfdefinition is heavily bound up with love of the natural world. We share this with Australia,
but there’s a twist. Australia has a strongly physical relationship with the land, needing to
have a sense of conquest or control—because their environment can be hostile and can kill
them. With New Zealanders’ climate and landscape being rather more benign, our view is
apparently more spiritual, even soulful.”
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We need to keep this front of mind when we are thinking about New Zealand and making
our way in the world. Lasting prosperity is built around national values. We are, Māori and
Pākehā, people of the land—and fundamentally we like it the way it came to us.
The work is complex and difficult, but the business case for it is simple: Toi te whenua, toi tū
te tangata—if we look after the land, the land will look after us. Tēnā koutou, tēnā koutou,
tēnā koutou katoa.
Source (adapted): http://www.doc.govt.nz/about-doc/news/speeches/al-morrison-at-lincoln-university/
(accessed 30 May, 2011).
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