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NSW Selective High School Placement Test · 38 questions · 45 minutes · no dictionary
Text 1 · Paired extracts
Read both extracts below, then answer the questions.
Extract A: from The Hill
We had to walk for nearly half an hour after dinner before we reached the spot Grandpa called The Hill. It wasn’t really a hill at all, just a slow rise above the back paddock where the trees thinned out and the sky opened up. By the time we got there it was almost completely dark. Grandpa lay down on the dry grass first, as he always did, and patted the ground next to him.
“Come on then. Best seats in the house.”
I lay down beside him. For the first few seconds, it was as though I were looking at a flat black ceiling. Then slowly, like film developing in a tray of liquid, the stars began to come through. First just two or three of the bright ones (Sirius, Grandpa would later tell me), and then, after a minute, hundreds. By the time my eyes had really settled, there were thousands.
“There you are,” Grandpa said. “That’s why it was worth the walk.”
He pointed up. “See those three in a line, right above us? That’s Orion’s belt. He’s hunting, that fellow. Up to his left, that bit of mist there, that’s another galaxy. Andromeda. The light coming off it set out about two and a half million years ago. It only just got here.”
I tried to take in what he meant. Light older than my whole life. Older than my mother and grandfather put together. Older than people. I had to close my eyes for a moment.
“Why didn’t anyone tell me?” I said. Grandpa laughed quietly. “I’m telling you now.”
Far off somewhere, a fox was barking. There was no wind. The grass smelled the way it does after a hot day, dry and a little sweet. Somewhere further along, a curlew called, that hollow, sad cry that always sounded to me like the night was listening to itself. I could hear my own heart beating, but only just.
After a long time Grandpa said, “When I was your age, I lived on a farm. We had no electric lights, so the sky was even bigger then. I used to go out on cold nights with no jumper, just to see what was up there. My mother would call me an idiot when I came in shivering. But I always thought it was worth being cold for.”
He paused. Then he said, very quietly, more to himself than to me, “Funny what you remember.”
We lay there for a long time without saying anything. Now and then he would point out a constellation: the Southern Cross, the Pointers, the False Cross, which was a trap, he said, because it looked like the real one and led you the wrong way home if you weren’t careful.
When we finally walked back, the sky stayed in my head all the way down the hill, and I think it has stayed there ever since.
Extract B: from A Night Outside Mount Pleasant
I was nineteen the first time I really understood what a constellation was. Up until then, I had thought of them in the cheerful way most people do: friendly cartoon shapes drawn on the sky, like a children’s join-the-dots puzzle. Orion was a man with a belt. The Southern Cross was a kite. I had heard the names, sometimes pointed in the rough direction; I had certainly looked up many times. But I had never really seen.
The change happened on a midwinter night near the small town of Mount Pleasant, several hours inland from the nearest big city. The astronomy student I was visiting drove me out past the town’s edge, parked at a gate, and turned off the headlights. When he asked me to look up, I could only think how cold I was. But then my eyes adjusted, and the sky, which I had always thought of as a thing rather like a ceiling, opened.
I am embarrassed to say that I made a small involuntary noise. It was the noise you might make if someone had quietly pulled the back wall of your house away while you were looking at the floor. The sky was deep. There were not just thousands of stars but an immense, three-dimensional cloud of them, layers behind layers, with rivers of dust running through. The Milky Way, which I had previously taken to be a polite phrase used by poets, was real, and it was enormous, a wide river of grainy light arching from one horizon to the other.
My friend pointed at a smudge. “Andromeda. Closest big galaxy. About two-and-a-half million light years away.”
That sentence does not really fit inside an ordinary head. I think of it now whenever someone asks me what humility is. There is a particular kind of feeling that comes from understanding, for the first time, how small you are and how briefly you have been around. It is not a sad feeling. It is more like being given a piece of perspective you didn’t know you were missing.
I have not become an astronomer. I cannot really tell you, even today, which star is which. But I make a point now, perhaps twice a year, of getting myself far enough from the city to see properly. I have learned that the sky is one of the few free and unlimited gifts a person can give themselves. It does not ask anything in return, and it is always there, perhaps best of all, waiting.
Both narrators go to a dark, open spot away from town lights. The first walks to The Hill where the sky opens up; the second is driven out past the town’s edge. Neither uses a telescope or climbs higher.
Both name Andromeda. The Milky Way appears only in the second extract, and Sirius only in the first. The Magellanic Cloud appears in neither.
In both, the turning point is hearing that Andromeda’s light is about two and a half million years old, a fact each narrator then struggles to take in.
The image compares the stars appearing to a photograph slowly developing. They emerge gradually as the eyes adjust, from two or three bright ones to thousands.
The text says he speaks very quietly, more to himself than to the child. The remark is a private reflection on his own childhood on the farm.
The text calls it a trap because it looks like the real Southern Cross and can lead you the wrong way home. The danger is that it is visually confused with another.
She is embarrassed because she reacted out loud to something that overwhelmed her, a stronger response than she expected. The image of a wall being pulled away captures that surprise.
The ending calls the sky a free and unlimited gift that offers perspective. She makes a point of going to see it, while saying plainly that she is not an expert.
Text 2 · Cloze
Read the text below. For each gap, choose the word that best fits.
The Sydney Harbour Bridge
When work first (9) ______ on the Sydney Harbour Bridge in 1923, very few people imagined how (10) ______ the project would prove to be. The original plan, drawn up by the British engineer Ralph Freeman, called for an enormous steel arch unlike anything yet attempted in the southern hemisphere. Critics in Sydney scoffed; some predicted that the entire structure would (11) ______ into the harbour the moment the two halves of the arch were joined.
The work itself was carried out in difficult conditions. Almost everything had to be (12) ______ by hand, often hundreds of metres above the water, by labourers wearing only thin protective clothing. Sixteen men died during the eight years of construction, a figure now considered (13) ______, but at the time accepted as the cost of building on such a scale. Most of the steel was imported from England and (14) ______ in Sydney by riveters working in extremely hot conditions inside the arch’s hollow ribs.
When the two halves of the arch finally met in August 1930, the city (15) ______ its breath. But the predictions proved unfounded; the structure stood firm. By the time the bridge was officially opened in March 1932, it had become not only an essential transport link but also one of the most photographed structures in the world. To Sydneysiders, it had become a (16) ______ of the city itself, something whose long, careful construction was now almost easy to forget.
Commenced fits the formal historical tone of work commencing in 1923. Started and opened are flatter, and departed does not fit work.
Demanding captures how difficult the project would prove, set up by the critics and the predictions of collapse. The others each cover only one aspect.
Plunge is the natural word for a huge structure falling dramatically into water. Drop and fall are flatter, and tumble suggests rolling, wrong for a steel arch.
Executed by hand is the formal expression for skilled manual work at scale. Conducted suits experiments, planned refers to design before the work, and salvaged means rescued.
Unacceptable contrasts directly with accepted as the cost later in the sentence. None of the other words creates that deliberate contrast.
Assembled is the standard verb for putting prefabricated steel parts together. Joined is close but less specific, and put together is too informal for the register.
Held its breath is the set idiom for tense collective anticipation. Caught its breath means to recover, the opposite, and the others do not form the idiom.
A symbol of the city is the standard phrase for something that stands in for the whole idea of Sydney. Picture and image are too literal, and emblem is more heraldic.
Text 3 · Poetry
Read the poem below, then answer the questions.
The Lighthouse
In the old days when ships put out
across the dark, uncertain sea,
the keeper kept his oil-lamp tall
and trimmed it nightly, carefully.
He had no city at his back,
no street, no neighbour, no parade
of company; only the white
small cottage and the light he made.
Each evening he would climb the stairs,
ninety-two of them, count them, no more,
and at the top, he would set his hand
to the lamp, just as the night before.
Down on the rocks the herring gulls
would gather, watching, as the light
swept in its slow and patient arc
across the long and shifting night.
He did not know whose lives he saved.
He could not know. He only knew
that out there in the larger dark
he held a small thing that was true.
The opening stresses routine (trimmed nightly, carefully) and the absence of distractions (no city, no street, no neighbour). The life is steady and unadorned, not dangerous or unrewarding.
Knowing the exact number of steps, and insisting on it, shows how intimately the keeper knows his work. There is no sign of tiredness or boredom in the line.
Describing the gulls as watching, a word used for an audience, quietly suggests that even nature attends to the keeper’s work. The poem gives no hint of fear or feeding.
The larger dark is set against the small true light. It stands for the wide, unknown world, full of lives the keeper cannot see, beyond what he can know.
Small signals humility and true signals genuine worth. Together they suggest the work was modest but meaningful, not profitable or merely difficult.
The tight, regular stanzas mirror the keeper’s steady, repeated nightly routine. Roughness or urgency would call for irregular, broken forms.
Text 4 · Sentence cloze
Six sentences have been removed from the text. For each gap, choose from sentences A to G the one that fits. There is one extra sentence you do not need to use.
The migration of humpback whales
Humpback whales are among the most remarkable long-distance travellers in the animal kingdom. Each year, populations of these huge marine mammals leave the cold, food-rich waters of the polar regions and journey thousands of kilometres towards warmer tropical seas, and then back again. (23) ______
Scientists have been studying these annual migrations for decades, but only recently have they begun to understand exactly how the whales navigate over such vast distances. (24) ______ Whales appear to use a combination of cues, including the Earth’s magnetic field, the position of the sun, and even the underwater landscape of the sea floor.
The journey itself is gruelling. (25) ______ Mother whales must give birth in warm waters and then guide their newborn calves all the way back south, even though the calf may be only a few weeks old when the return journey begins.
What makes the migration so remarkable is that, for much of the journey, the whales do not eat. (26) ______ A single whale can lose more than a third of its body weight on the trip, yet must still find the energy to sing, dive, and protect its young.
One of the most fascinating discoveries about humpback migration concerns whale song. (27) ______ Researchers have found that the songs evolve year by year, with new phrases being added and old ones dropped. Whales in different parts of the ocean even appear to learn songs from each other across distances of thousands of kilometres.
Today, humpback numbers are slowly recovering after decades of commercial hunting. (28) ______ With careful protection of the routes the whales follow each year, scientists hope that future generations will be able to witness this extraordinary journey.
The previous sentence describes a round trip of thousands of kilometres each way. Sentence C quantifies that double journey as more than ten thousand kilometres in a year.
The paragraph is about how whales navigate. Sentence E gives the historical puzzle, that no one knew how they found their way back, which the next sentence begins to answer.
The journey is called gruelling. Sentence F explains why, with some whales travelling while feeding young or heavily pregnant, and the next sentence develops the example of mothers and calves.
The whales do not eat during migration. Sentence A explains how they survive instead, on stored body fat, which the next sentence about losing weight supports.
The paragraph introduces whale song. Sentence B narrows it to who sings and when, before the next sentence describes how the songs change. Sentence D is the spare one.
Numbers are recovering after hunting. Sentence G pivots to say recovery needs more than an end to hunting, which the next sentence about protecting routes explains.
Text 5 · Multi-text · rivers
Read the four extracts below, each on the theme of rivers, then answer the questions.
Extract A
It is hard to explain to someone who has never been in a small boat on slow water why river-going is different from sea-going or lake-going. On the sea, you are always moving against something: wind, tide, swell. On a lake, you sit still. On a river, the river moves you. You can choose to paddle harder, or you can choose to rest. Either way, you are going somewhere.
The first time I took a canoe out on the Yarra was probably twenty-five years ago. I have been back many times. What surprises me, every single time, is how quickly the city falls away. Within about ten minutes of putting in at Hawthorn, the noise of traffic has gone, and the only sounds are the occasional kingfisher and the soft scrape of the paddle on the boat. People walking on the path above sometimes don’t notice you. From their height, you are just a blur on the brown water. Down there, you are alone with the river.
Extract B
A river is essentially a story about water moving downhill. Every drop of water in a river is on its way somewhere, usually, eventually, the sea. But the path that drop takes is shaped by what scientists call the river’s regime: its slope, its volume, the materials it cuts through, and the rate at which it picks up and deposits sediment.
In their upper sections, where rivers are young and the slope is steep, the water moves fast and the river behaves like a cutter, carving narrow valleys and waterfalls into the rock. Lower down, where the slope eases off, the river slows and begins to wander. It deposits its sediment in long bends called meanders. In its lowest stretches, where it nears the sea, the river often splits into many smaller channels, a delta, before disappearing entirely. Understanding this sequence is the first lesson of fluvial geomorphology, and it explains almost everything you see when you look closely at any river system.
Extract C
The river I grew up beside was the Coliban, in central Victoria. By the time it reached our paddock, it was not really a river any more, more like a long string of small pools connected by trickles. In summer it almost disappeared. In winter it ran black, with willow leaves spinning on its surface.
We weren’t supposed to swim in it. There were warnings about leeches, about snakes coming down to drink, about the occasional drowning of someone’s stupid older cousin. But every summer, when the heat was too much, my brothers and I would slip down through the fence at the bottom of the paddock and lie in the deepest pool we could find. The pool was always cold, even when the air above it was thirty-eight degrees. It always smelled of cow and willow and something darker, a sweet, slow river smell I have never quite found anywhere else.
Extract D
The Mekong River begins as a trickle in the high snowfields of Tibet, descends through the gorges of southwestern China, and then crosses through five more countries (Myanmar, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia and Vietnam) before emptying into the South China Sea. Along its 4,350-kilometre journey, it provides drinking water, transport, food, and livelihood for more than sixty million people.
For most of its course, the Mekong is wild. There are no major dams in the Lao or Cambodian stretches. Fishermen still take their boats out at dusk, casting nets weighted with stones and pulling them in by hand a few hours later. Children swim in the shallows. Buffalo cool themselves in the muddy edges. The river is brown, never green, never blue, and it carries an enormous load of silt down to the Vietnamese delta, where that silt nourishes some of the most productive rice-growing soil on Earth. To stand on a Mekong bridge at sunset is to understand, in a single image, how a river can hold an entire civilisation together.
Extract B gives the scientific framework: the river’s regime, meanders, deltas, and fluvial geomorphology. No other extract attempts a systematic explanation.
Extract A is written from a canoe on the Yarra. Extract D mentions fishermen in boats but not the writer canoeing.
Extract C lists the childhood warnings: leeches, snakes coming down to drink, and the occasional drowning. No other extract describes warnings.
Extract D follows the Mekong across six countries. None of the other rivers is described as international.
Extract D explains that the Mekong’s silt nourishes some of the most productive rice-growing soil on Earth. Extract B mentions sediment generally but not its farming benefit.
Extract A says the writer has been back many times. No other extract emphasises ongoing return.
Extract C ends on the river’s smell of cow and willow and something darker. The other extracts rely mostly on sight or sound.
Extract A contrasts river-going with sea-going and lake-going: on the sea you move against something, on a lake you sit still, on a river the river moves you.
Extract B explains the delta pattern, where the river splits into many channels as it nears the sea. Extract D names a delta but does not explain the pattern.
Extract D gives the figure of more than sixty million people depending on the Mekong. No other extract gives such a number.
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