Formatve 1 Paper
Formatve 1 Paper
After fifteen years in prison I was beginning to assume my life couldn’t get any
more lopsided and annoying, but now some cruel functionary has started a war
against the local swallows.
Each day at dawn and again during the fading light of dusk I watch the hardy little
birds hurtle by the hundreds across the sky, coasting and whipping about in
unison, exercising perhaps or catching bugs or flying just for the joy of it. They
wheel through the air like drunken, feathered acrobats, breathtaking and beautiful.
American cliff swallows have been coming here to San Luis Obispo, California,
for probably a thousand years, flying up from Argentina, I’m told. The California
Men’s Colony is in the middle of their nesting ground. Once here, they
industriously search out globs of mud and build nests that resemble tiny desert
igloos. As if the prison existed for their convenience, the swallows make their lairs
in a central area we call the “plaza”: a couple of trees and some sickly grass
surrounded by a three-story-tall catwalk made of steel girders. Staff and convicts
march through the plaza each day to go to work, school, the library, and so on,
while above us, in the niches and nooks of the steel beams, the birds construct
nests three to four inches apart — a few thousand of them. The prison is like an
aviary of sorts, except the swallows are free and the humans are trapped.[…]
The swallows perform their complicated aerial gyrations with a grace that’s alien
to our clumsy human world, and without crashing into each other and falling to
the ground like Icarus, or me.
[…]
But now, while the swallows are out hunting, some deranged prison bureaucrat
has decided to destroy their nests and cover the steel girders with nets to
discourage the birds from returning. Watching the crews break up the nests and
put up the nets is aggravating; the dauntless birds already have to deal with
hurricanes, hungry hawks, foxes, and a multitude of other natural threats.
1. A
Explain one technique the writer uses for effect in the following lines: (2marks)
‘The swallows perform their complicated aerial gyrations with a grace that’s alien
to our clumsy human world, and without crashing into each other and falling to
the ground like Icarus, or me.’
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1. B
Analyse the narrator's description of birds and what his observations reveal about
him. (3 marks)
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Text 2
1. C
Comment how the narrator's voice over complements the action. (2 marks)
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1. D
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Q. 2 Compare and contrast how writer and the film maker poetry prisoners. (350
words)
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