WACE English Practice Questions
The 64 practice questions inside the WACE English Mastery Pack, grouped by area of study. Every question comes with a full worked solution.
- Compare texts from similar or different genres and contexts
- Multiple choice × 6
- Analyse × 1
- Compare × 1
- Investigate and evaluate the relationships between texts and contexts
- Multiple choice × 5
- Analyse × 1
- Compare × 1
- Evaluate different perspectives, attitudes and values represented in texts
- Multiple choice × 6
- Evaluate × 1
- Interpret × 1
- Compare and contrast distinctive features of genres
- Multiple choice × 5
- Contrast × 1
- Analyse × 1
- Analyse and critically appraise how the conventions of texts influence responses
- Multiple choice × 5
- Explain × 1
- Evaluate × 1
- Evaluate how texts offer perspectives
- Multiple choice × 5
- Evaluate × 1
- Analyse × 1
- Create a range of texts
- Multiple choice × 8
- Discuss × 1
- Synthesise × 1
- Reflect on their own and others’ texts
- Multiple choice × 8
- Evaluate × 1
- Discuss × 1
The two openings below were written for this exercise. Both begin a text about the same bushfire.
Text A (news report): "A fire burning east of the town has destroyed four homes and remains uncontained, with authorities warning that conditions will deteriorate overnight."
Text B (memoir): "The light went wrong first. By four o'clock the kitchen had turned the colour of weak tea, and my mother began taking photographs off the wall without saying why."
Analyse how the language and structural choices in each opening position the reader differently. (6 marks)
Show the worked answer
Answer: Worked solution
Text A places the event before any person: the grammatical subject is "a fire", and the homes appear only as its object, already "destroyed". Loss is delivered as a countable quantity ("four homes") and the human presence in the sentence is institutional - "authorities" who warn. The verb tenses run from completed damage to forecast danger, so the reader is positioned as a member of the public receiving information they may need to act on, and the emotional work is left entirely to the facts.
Text B withholds the word "fire" altogether. It opens on an effect - "the light went wrong" - and makes the reader infer the cause, so the reader occupies the child-narrator's position of knowing something is happening before knowing what. The domestic simile "the colour of weak tea" measures catastrophe on the scale of a kitchen, and the mother's unexplained action, reported without interpretation ("without saying why"), transfers the child's incomprehension to the reader.
The two openings therefore construct different relationships: A addresses a reader who needs to be informed, B a reader who must reconstruct. A's structure moves from event to consequence to warning; B's moves from sensation to detail to unexplained behaviour, delaying the very information A leads with.
20 full-length practice exams with worked solutions, 20 revision notes, 64 practice questions and 200 flashcards.
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