The mountain · English ridge · camp 1 of 4

Reading

Reading: a short passage, then questions on what it says, what it implies, how it is built, and why the writer chose those particular words.

Eight rungs, one trail

Every camp on the mountain has the same eight rungs: the eight altitudes Alpenrise measures, read back in the words of your own school system. Rung 1 is the bottom of secondary school; rung 8 is beyond the final exam.

One question from each rung

The mountain draws three questions per rung from the same slice as the free placement. Here is one from each rung of Reading, shown without its answer.

1. Rung 1 · Explorer · Year 7On a cold rocky island off the coast of New Zealand, an animal that looks like a small lizard sits almost perfectly still. It is a tuatara, and although it resembles a lizard, it is not one. Tuatara belong to an ancient group of reptiles whose relatives lived alongside the dinosaurs more than 200 million years ago. Every other member of that group has vanished, which makes the tuatara a kind of living museum. Tuatara do everything slowly. They can take up to thirty-five years to reach full size, and some live for more than a hundred years. Unlike most reptiles, they stay active in cool weather that would send a lizard into hiding. Scientists once worried the tuatara might disappear, because rats brought to New Zealand by ships ate their eggs. Today many tuatara are protected on islands where the rats have been removed, and their numbers are slowly climbing again.Why might the writer include the detail that tuatara 'stay active in cool weather that would send a lizard into hiding'?to prove tuatara are lazy · to show a surprising way the tuatara is different from ordinary lizards · to warn readers about cold islands · to explain why rats are dangerous
2. Rung 2 · Pathfinder · Year 8The final whistle blew with the scoreboard reading eighteen to twenty-one, and Nina's netball team had lost their first match of the season. In the change room afterwards, a few of the younger players looked close to tears, and someone muttered that the umpire's calls had cost them the game. Nina, as captain, could have agreed. Two decisions had seemed harsh, and blaming them would have felt easier than what she actually did next. Instead, she pointed out that they had missed six easy shots in the first half — shots her team usually made without thinking twice — and that fixing that would matter far more next time than any single umpire's call. "We were good enough to win today," she said. "We just didn't play like it for the first fifteen minutes." Nobody cheered. But by the time everyone had changed out of their uniforms, the mood in the room had shifted from blaming others to planning for the next match.What does the detail that 'nobody cheered' after Nina's speech suggest about the mood in the room?The team was still disappointed, even while beginning to accept her point · The team completely disagreed with everything that Nina had just said to them · The team was too excited about winning to react calmly · The team had already stopped listening to their captain
3. Rung 3 · Voyager · Year 9Every year, the same dread returned in the week before the school speech competition: the dry mouth, the racing heart, the certainty, entirely unreasonable, that every single person in the audience was silently judging every word. Jack had entered the competition for two years running and had frozen completely, mid-sentence, on both occasions. This year, his English teacher had suggested something unusual: instead of trying to make the fear disappear, Jack should try noticing it without fighting it. "Your heart racing doesn't mean you're about to fail," she said. "It might just mean you care about doing well. Athletes get the same racing heart before a race, and they call it being ready, not being afraid." Standing backstage this year, Jack's heart still raced exactly as it always had. But instead of treating that feeling as a warning sign, he told himself, silently, that he was ready. He still stumbled once over a difficult sentence halfway through his speech. He did not, however, freeze. For the first time in three years, he reached the final line.Why does the teacher compare Jack's racing heart to what athletes feel before a race?To reframe his fear as a sign of readiness rather than a sign that he will fail · To suggest that Jack should clearly take up athletics instead of public speaking · To prove that all racing hearts are caused by the exact same feeling · To explain that athletes never actually feel nervous before competing
4. Rung 4 · Navigator · Year 1014th of March. Today I saw the land that is to be our home, and I did not know whether to laugh or to weep. For ninety-one days the ship has been our whole world — the same faces, the same salt biscuit, the same grey heave of the sea. I had almost forgotten that ground could hold still. The hills came up out of the mist, greener than any green in England, and terribly steep. Mother gripped the rail and said nothing at all, which frightened me more than tears would have. Father says there will be a house by winter. He says a great many things now, more loudly than he used to, and I have begun to notice that the louder he says a thing, the less certain he is of it. I am to be brave for the little ones. So I have not told anyone that when I look at those beautiful, unfamiliar hills, what I feel is not hope, exactly, but something closer to fear wearing hope's coat.Why does the mother's silence frighten the narrator 'more than tears would have'?Her silence hints at a worry too deep to put into words · The narrator could not hear her over the loud sea · Silence was always the mother's way of showing joy · The mother had fallen asleep against the ship's rail
5. Rung 5 · Pioneer · Year 11'The Long Dark' arrives with a cover built for the school library shelf - a lantern, a forest, a single silhouetted child - and very little in those two hundred pages prepares a ten-year-old for what waits inside. A beloved grandmother's death, on page eleven, is only the gentlest of what follows. None of this makes the book poorly made. The prose is careful, the grief is never used cheaply for shock, and the ending, when it comes, earns its small light honestly rather than simply supplying one. Reviewers writing for adult literary pages have called it 'unflinching' and 'necessary,' and on its own terms they are right. The trouble is the shelf it has been placed on. A book intended, whatever its publisher's marketing insists, for readers a few years older has been sold to primary schools as an award-winning children's title, sitting between stories about talking dogs and lost mittens. A teacher recommending books by cover and age category alone, without reading the book itself first, could hand a nine-year-old a story that a thoughtful thirteen-year-old might handle far better. The book is not the difficulty here. The difficulty is a shelf that cannot tell the difference between books written for children and books written, brilliantly, about them.The writer's tone toward the book itself, as opposed to its shelf placement, is best described as -genuinely admiring, while still raising a serious concern elsewhere · entirely dismissive of the book's literary quality from start to finish · amused, treating the whole situation as nothing more than a joke · uncertain, offering no real opinion of the book at all
6. Rung 6 · Summit · Year 12After a string of late-night incidents in the town centre, the council introduced a curfew: anyone under seventeen found in the central shopping area after ten o'clock, without an adult, can be asked by police to explain themselves and, if necessary, escorted home. Supporters call it a straightforward safety measure. Opponents call it a blunt instrument that punishes an entire age group for the actions of a small handful within it. The available data complicates both slogans. Incidents in the targeted area did fall in the months after the curfew began, which supporters cite as vindication. But incidents were already falling slightly before the curfew was introduced, part of a longer trend the council's own report barely mentions, which makes it difficult to say how much of the further drop the curfew itself actually caused rather than simply coincided with. Meanwhile, the curfew's actual daily effect falls almost entirely on ordinary teenagers doing ordinary things - walking home from a friend's house, waiting for a late bus - while the handful who caused the original concern were arguably never going to be stopped by a rule they were already breaking plenty of others to begin with. Whether the curfew belongs in the 'sensible' or 'mismatched' category may depend less on the statistics than on which teenagers a given resident actually pictures when they hear the word 'curfew.'According to the passage, what can police do if they find someone under seventeen in the central shopping area after ten o'clock without an adult?Ask them to explain themselves and, if necessary, escort them home · Issue an immediate fine to the teenager's family · Arrest them immediately and hold them at the local police station overnight · Confiscate their phone until a parent collects it
7. Rung 7 · Apex · Year 13A single private flight can release more carbon in an hour than an average person releases in a year. This is not a rhetorical flourish; it is closer to the plain, unglamorous arithmetic of very different lifestyles, and it sits uneasily beside a public conversation about climate change that spends a great deal of energy on everyone's shopping bags and comparatively little on the far smaller number of people responsible for a hugely disproportionate share of individual emissions. There is a reason for the imbalance, and it is not simply oversight. A shopping bag is a choice available to nearly everyone, which makes it an easy, universal thing to write an article about; a private jet is a choice available to almost no one, which makes it a smaller, more awkward target - awkward partly because naming specific wealthy individuals invites a different, thornier kind of argument than naming a general habit does. None of this means ordinary personal choices are pointless, multiplied as they are across billions of people. But an argument that spends most of its energy on the most numerous, least consequential choices, and comparatively little on the least numerous, most consequential ones, has picked its target for ease of writing rather than for size of impact - and it is worth asking, occasionally, which of those two things is actually doing the choosing.Which statement best captures the writer's overall position?Ordinary choices are not pointless, but public attention has been drawn to the easiest target rather than the highest-impact one · Ordinary personal choices about everyday consumption have no real measurable effect on emissions at all, ever, according to the writer · Private flights should be banned immediately for all passengers · The imbalance in public attention has no real explanation worth considering
8. Rung 8 · Beyond · NZ ScholarshipTEXT A The idea that we can keep growing the global economy indefinitely while cutting emissions to nothing - 'green growth,' as its advocates call it - asks for something no economy has ever actually demonstrated at the pace and scale required. A few wealthy nations have managed to grow their economies while emissions fell slightly at home, largely by shifting heavy manufacturing to poorer countries and importing the resulting goods, which moves the emissions onto someone else's ledger rather than eliminating them. Degrowth argues plainly for what green growth tries to avoid saying aloud: beyond a certain point, wealthy economies need to produce and consume less overall, deliberately and by design, not merely more efficiently. TEXT B Degrowth is morally serious and economically perilous in roughly equal measure. Deliberately shrinking an economy does not shrink evenly or by design; it falls first and hardest on workers in the industries being wound down, rarely on the wealthy who can absorb a downturn most easily, and a policy that visibly makes ordinary people poorer is not a policy democracies tend to keep voting for twice. Green growth's actual claim is narrower than its critics allow: not that growth solves climate change automatically, but that decoupling emissions from output is achievable with the right regulation and investment, and considerably easier to sustain politically than asking an electorate to accept a smaller economy on faith, for a benefit distributed mostly to people not yet born.Text A's argument against 'green growth' rests mainly on the claim that -no economy has actually demonstrated the required decoupling of growth from emissions at the necessary pace and scale · green growth has already been achieved by every wealthy nation · degrowth has already been tried out extensively and proven fully and conclusively to work at a genuinely global economic scale · emissions have never been shown to relate to economic growth at all

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