MOCK EXAM16
SIMULA UN ENTORNO TRANQUILO DURANTE CUATRO HORAS Y MEDIA
COMO SI ESTUVIERAS EN EL EXAMEN. DURANTE ESE TIEMPO:
1. ELIGE UN TEMA Y REDÁCTALO SIN MIRAR APUNTES, SIMULANDO
EXAMEN REAL.
2. ELIGE TRES PREGUNTAS DE LAS SEIS DEL TEXTO.
GOOD LUCK!
PRACTICAL EXAM:
MERCURY IN SAGITTARIUS.
In which a stranger arrives in Hokitika; a secret council is disturbed; Walter Moody
conceals his most recent memory; and Thomas Balfour begins to tell a story.
The twelve men congregated in the smoking room of the Crown Hotel gave the
impression of a party accidentally met. From the variety of their comportment and dress
— frock coats, tailcoats, Norfolk jackets with buttons of horn, yellow moleskin, cambric,
and twill — they might have been twelve strangers on a railway car, each bound for a
separate quarter of a city that possessed fog and tides enough to divide them; indeed,
the studied isolation of each man as he pored over his paper, or leaned forward to tap
his ashes into the grate, or placed the splay of his hand upon the baize to take his shot
at billiards, conspired to form the very type of bodily silence that occurs, late in the
evening, on a public railway — deadened here not by the slur and clunk of the
coaches, but by the fat clatter of the rain.
Such was the perception of Mr. Walter Moody, from where he stood in the doorway
with his hand upon the frame. He was innocent of having disturbed any kind of private
conference, for the speakers had ceased when they heard his tread in the passage; by
the time he opened the door, each of the twelve men had resumed his occupation
(rather haphazardly, on the part of the billiard players, for they had forgotten their
places) with such a careful show of absorption that no one even glanced up when he
stepped into the room.
The strictness and uniformity with which the men ignored him might have aroused Mr.
Moody's interest, had he been himself in body and temperament. As it was, he was
queasy and disturbed. He had known the voyage to West Canterbury would be fatal at
worst, an endless rolling trough of white water and spume that ended on the shattered
graveyard of the Hokitika bar, but he had not been prepared for the particular horrors of
the journey, of which he was still incapable of speaking, even to himself. Moody was by
nature impatient of any deficiencies in his own person — fear and illness both turned
him inward — and it was for this reason that he very uncharacteristically failed to
assess the tenor of the room he had just entered.
Moody's natural expression was one of readiness and attention. His grey eyes were
large and unblinking, and his supple, boyish mouth was usually poised in an
expression of polite concern. His hair inclined to a tight curl; it had fallen in ringlets to
his shoulders in his youth, but now he wore it close against his skull, parted on the side
and combed flat with a sweet-smelling pomade that darkened its golden hue to an oily
, MOCK EXAM16
brown. His brow and cheeks were square, his nose straight, and his complexion
smooth. He was not quite eight-and-twenty, still swift and exact in his motions, and
possessed of the kind of roguish, unsullied vigour that conveys neither gullibility nor
guile. He presented himself in the manner of a discreet and quick-minded butler, and
as a consequence was often drawn into the confidence of the least voluble of men, or
invited to broker relations between people he had only lately met. He had, in short, an
appearance that betrayed very little about his own character, and an appearance that
others were immediately inclined to trust.
Moody was not unaware of the advantage his inscrutable grace afforded him. Like
most excessively beautiful persons, he had studied his own reflection minutely and, in
a way, knew himself from the outside best; he was always in some chamber of his
mind perceiving himself from the exterior. He had passed a great many hours in the
alcove of his private dressing room, where the mirror tripled his image into profile, half-
profile, and square: Van Dyck's Charles, though a good deal more striking. It was a
private practice, and one he would likely have denied — for how roundly self-
examination is condemned, by the moral prophets of our age! As if the self had no
relation to the self, and one only looked in mirrors to have one's arrogance confirmed;
as if the act of self-regarding was not as subtle, fraught and ever-changing as any bond
between twin souls. In his fascination Moody sought less to praise his own beauty than
to master it. Certainly whenever he caught his own reflection, in a window box, or in a
pane of glass after nightfall, he felt a thrill of satisfaction — but as an engineer might
feel, chancing upon a mechanism of his own devising and finding it splendid, flashing,
properly oiled and performing exactly as he had predicted it should.
SOURCE: The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton.
1. Comment on the narrative style of the text.
2. Would you use non-contemporary prose in your classes?
3. Find synonyms in the text for the following words:
a) Shrewdness:
b) Supernatural:
c) Valley:
d) Fireplace:
e) Step:
4. Explain the meaning of the following words from the text:
1. Pored over:
2. Clatter:
3. Queasy:
4. Supple:
5. Alcove:
