MOCK EXAM 6
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:
1 THE CHILDREN were at the Theatre, acting to Three Cows as much as they could remember of
2 Midsummer Night's Dream. Their father had made them a small la out of the big Shakespeare
3 one, and they had rehearsed it with him and with their mother till they could say it by heart.
4 They began when Nick Bottom the weaver comes out of the bushes with a donkey's head on
5 his shoulders, and finds Titania, Queen of the Fairies, asleep. Then they skipped to the part
6 where Bottom asks three little fairies to scratch his head and bring him honey, and they ended
7 where he falls asleep in Titania's arms. Dan was Puck and Nick Bottom, as well as all three
8 Fairies. He wore a pointy-cloth cap for Puck, and a paper donkey's head out of a Christmas
9 cracker-but it tore if you were not careful-for Bottom. Una was Titania, with a wreath of
10 columbines and a foxglove wand.
11 The Theatre lay in a meadow called the Long Slip. A little mill-stream, carrying water to a mill
12 two or three fields away, bent round one comer of it, and in the middle of the bend lay a large
13 old Fairy Ring of darkened grass, which was the stage. The millstream banks, overgrown with
14 willow, hazel, and guelder-rose, made convenient places to wait in till your turn carne; and a
15 grown-up who had seen it said that Shakespeare himself could not have imagined a more suit-
16 able setting for his play. They were not, of course, allowed to act on Midsummer Night itself,
17 but they went down after tea on Midsummer Eve, when the shadows were growing, and they
18 took their supper-hard-boiled eggs, Bath Oliver biscuits, and salt in an envelope-with them.
19 Three Cows had been milked and were grazing steadily with a tearing noise that one could hear
20 all down the meadow; and the noise of the Mill at work sounded like bare feet running on hard
21 ground. A cuckoo sat on a gate-post singing his broken June tune, 'cuckoo-cuck', while a busy
22 kingfisher crossed from the mill-stream, to the brook which ran on the other side of the
23 meadow. Everything else was a sort of thick, sleepy stillness smelling of meadow-sweet and dry
24 grass.
25 Their play went beautifully. Dan remembered all his parts-Puck, Bottom, and the three
26 Fairies-and Una never forgot a word of Titania-not even the difficult piece where she tells the
27 Fairies how to feed Bottom with 'apricocks, green figs, and dewberries', and all the lines end in
28 'ies'. They were both so pleased that they acted it three times over from beginning to end
29 before they sat down in the unthistly centre of the Ring to eat eggs and Bath Olivers. This was
30 when they heard a whistle among the alders on the bank, and they jumped.
31 The bushes parted. In the very spot where Dan had stood as Puck they saw a small, brown,
32 broad-shouldered, pointy-eared person with a snub nose, slanting blue eyes, and a grin that ran
33 right across his freckled face. He shaded his forehead as though he were watching Quince,
34 Snout, Bottom, and the others rehearsing Pyramus and Thisbe, and, in a voice as deep as
35 Three Cows asking to be milked, he began:
36 'What hempen homespuns have we swaggering here, so near the cradle of the fairy Queen?'
37 He stopped, hollowed one hand round his ear, and, with a wicked twinkle in his eye, went on:
38 'What, a play toward? I’ll be an auditor; An actor, too, perhaps, if I see cause.'
, MOCK EXAM 6
39 The children looked and gasped. The small thing- he was no taller than Dan's shoulder-
40 stepped quietly into the Ring. 'I'm rather out of practice,' said he; 'but that's the way my part
41 ought to be played,'Still the children stared at him-from his dark-blue cap, like a big columbine
42 flower, to his bare, hairy feet. At last he laughed.
43 'Please don't look like that. It isn't my fault. What else could you expect?' he said.
44 'We didn't expect any one,' Dan answered slowly. 'This is our field.'
45 'Is it?' said their visitar, sitting down. 'Then what on Human Earth made you act Midsummer
46 Night's Dream three times over, on Midsummer Eve, in the middle of a Ring, and under-right
47 under one of my oldest hills in Old England? Pook's Hill-Puck's Hill-Puck's Hill-Pook's Hill! It's
48 as plain as the nose on my face.'
49 He pointed to the bare, fern-covered slope of Pook's Hill that runs up from the far side of the
50 mill-stream to a dark wood. Beyond that wood the ground rises and rises for five hundred feet,
51 till at last you climb out on the bare top of Beacon Hill, to look over the Pevensey Levels and
52 the Channel and half the naked South Downs.
53 'By Oak, Ash, and Thorn!' he cried, still laughing. 'If this had happened a few hundred years
54 ago you'd have had ali the People of the Hills out like bees in June!'
55 'We didn't know it was wrong,' said Dan.
56 'Wrong!' The little fellow shook with laughter. 'Indeed, it isn't wrong. You've done something
57 that Kings and Knights and Scholars in old days would have given their crowns and spursand
58 books to find out. If Merlin himself had helped you, you couldn't have managed better! You've
59 broken the Hills-you've broken the Hills! It hasn't happened in a thousand years.'
SOURCE: Puck of Pook’s Hill, by Rudyard Kipling.
1. Identify the author, the work and analyse the style of the text.
2. Explain five sociocultural aspects from the text which might be interesting
to studénts in secondary education and propose procedures to teach them.
3. Analyze the following sentence morpho-syntactically:
A little mill-stream, carrying water to a mill two or three fields away, bent round one
comer of it.
4. Comment on the role of authors such as Rudyard Kipling, Mark Twain,
R.L. Stevenson or Lewis Carrol in the spread of the reading habit
among children and teenagers. (Max. 200 words).
