MOCK EXAM 14
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 Up until the time I was seven years old my parents had lived in what was called a double
2 house. The word duplex was perhaps not in use at that time, and anyway the house was not
3 evenly divided. Vema's grandmother rented the rooms at the back and we rented the rooms at
4 the front. The house was tall and bare and ugly, painted yellow. The town we lived in was too
5 small to have residential divisions that amounted to anything, but I suppose that as far as there
6 were divisions, that house was right on the boundary between decent and fairly di-Iapidated. I
7 am speaking of the way things were just before the Second World War, at the end of the
8 Depression. (That word, I believe, was unknown to us.)
9 My father, being a teacher, had a regular job but little money. The street petered out beyond
10 us between the houses of those who had neither. Verna's grandmother must have had a little
11 money because she spoke contemptuously of people who were On Relief. I believe my mother
12 argued with her, unsuccessfully, that it was Not Their Fault. The two women were not particular
13 friends, but they were cordial about clothesline arrangements.
14 The grandmother's name was Mrs. Home. A man came to see her occasionally. My mother
15 spoke of him as Mrs. Home's friend.
16 You are not to speak to Mrs. Home's friend.
17 In fact I was not even allowed to play outside when he came, so there was not much chance of
18 my speaking to him. I don't even remember what he looked like, though I remember his car,
19 which was dark blue, a Ford V-8. I took a special interest in cars, probably because we didn't
20 have one.
21 Then Vema came.
22 (1) Mrs. Home spoke of her as her granddaughter and there is no reason to suppose that not to
23 be true, but there was never any sign of a connecting generation. I don't know if Mrs. Home
24 went away and came back with her, or if she was delivered by the friend with the V-8. She
25 appeared in the summer before I was to start school. I can't remember her telling me her
26 name-she was not communicative in the ordinary way and I don't believe I would have asked
27 her. From the very beginning I had an aversion to her unlike anything I had felt up to that time
28 for any other person. I said that I hated her, and my mother said, How can you, what has she
29 ever done to you?
30 The poor thing.
, MOCK EXAM 14
31 Children use that word hate to mean various things. It may mean that they are frightened. Not
32 that they feel in danger of being attacked - the way I did, for instance, of certain big boys on
33 bicycles who liked to cut in front of you, yelling fearsomely, as you walked on the sidewalk. It is
34 not physical harm that is feared-or that I feared in Vema's case-so much as some spell, or dark
35 intention. It is a feeling you can have when you are very young even about certain house faces,
36 or tree trunks, or very much about moldy cellars or deep closets.
37 She was a good deal taller than I was and I don't know how much older-two years, three
38 years? She was skinny, indeed so narrowly built and with such a small head that she made me
39 think of a snake. Fine black hair lay flat on this head, and fell over her forehead. The skin of her
40 face seemed as dull to me as the flap of our old canvas tent, a cheeks puffed out the
41 way the flap of that tent puffed in a wind. Her eyes were always squinting . (2)
42 But I believe there was nothing remarkably unpleasant about her looks, as other people saw
43 her. Indeed my mother spoke of her as pretty, or almost pretty (as in, isn't too bad, she could
44 be pretty). Nothing to object to either, as far as my mother "could see, in her behavior. She is
45 young for her age. A roundabout inadequate way of saying that Vema had not learned to
46 read or write or skip or play ball, and that her voice was hoarse and unmodulated, her words
47 oddly separated, as if they were chunks of language caught in her throat.
48 Her way of interfering with me, spoiling my solitary games, was that of an older not a younger
49 girl. But of an older girl who had no skill or rights, nothing but a strenuous determination and
50 an inability to understand that she wasn't wanted.
51 Children of course are monstrously conventional, repelled at once by whatever is off-center,
52 out-of-whack, unmanageable. And being an only child I had been coddled good deal (also
53 scolded). I was awkward, precocious, timid, full of my private rituals and aversions. I hated
54 even the celluloid barrette that kept slipping out of Verna's hair, and the peppermints with red
55 or green stripes on them that she kept offering to me. In fact she did more than offer-she
56 would try to catch me and push these candies into my mouth, all the time in her
57 disconnected way. I dislike peppermint flavoring to this day. And the name Vema – I dislike that.
58 It doesn‘t sound like spring to me, or like green grass or garlands of flowers or girls in flimsy
59 dresses. It sounds more like a trail of obstinate peppermint, green slime.
60 I didn't believe my mother really liked Verna either. But because of some hypocrisy in her
61 nature, as I saw it, because of a decision she had made, as it seemed, to spite me, she
62 pretended to be sorry for her. She told me to be kind. At first she said that Vema would not be
63 staying long and at the end of the summer holidays would go back to wherever she had been
64 before.Then, when it became clear that there was nowhere for Vema to go back to, the
65 placating messageing soon. I had only to be kind for a little while longer. (As a matter of fact it
66 was a whole year before we moved.) Finally, out of patience, she said that I was a
67 disappointment to her and that she would never have thoughtI had so mean a nature.
68 How can you blame a person for the way she was born? How is it her fault?
SOURCE: Child’s Play by From Alice Munro (Alice Munro is the recipient of the 2013 Nobel
Prize in Literature).
1. How does the author use the narrator to present characters?
2. Translate the text from (1) to (2).
