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The Matrix English Team shares their exemplar responses to the 2023 HSC English Standard Exam Paper 1. See what Band 6 response structures and analysis would look like!
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The 2023 HSC English Standard Exam Paper 1 Sample Answers are here! Keep reading to see exemplar responses that would score highly.
Looking for other HSC English Standard solutions? Find them, here.
In this article, we share sample answers written by the Matrix English Team for Section 1 for the 2023 HSC English Standard Exam Paper 1. The paper will be released on the NESA website here.
Click here to navigate to sample responses for all the questions.
Text 1 – Poem
Explain how Greenacre represents the value of shared experiences.
Greenacre represents the experiences families share within the home space as important core memories that last forever. The recurring symbol of the tea sitting in its tin across many years represents the strength and warmth of intergenerational connections, even after family members pass away. Furthermore, the anecdote of the persona still being able to “see them all/ waiting round the table/ waiting for the tea to brew” establishes how important family memories are, and how the tea tin continues to bring people together. The poem’s final line highlights this family unity in the balanced expression of “by cup, by spoon”, where the small units of tea are a metaphor for all the individual family members who come together to share a collective family experience.
Text 2 – Feature article extract
How does Dahl use personal experience to show the reader the importance of kindness?
Dahl uses her personal experiences of being a guest in other people’s homes to show how kindness leaves a lasting impression on the receiver. These impactful personal experiences come in the form of anecdotes. Dahl’s personal anecdote of her “next-door neighbours’” kindness endures in her memory, especially due to the delightful experience of eating “deep-fat fryer chips”. Dahl uses the symbol of food throughout this feature article extract to represent kindness. In the final anecdote of being a “furious, spiky 16-year-old”, Dahl lists the raspberry jam croissant with “orange juice and a cafetiere” to symbolise how providing food is an act of kindness. In contrast to being full of food, the writer paints a picture of bad hosts being unkind, where the fridge is “barren” despite inviting people over. She warns against this inconsiderate unkindness, and uses her personal experiences to suggest that to be generous is to be kind, and that kindness will make lasting good memories.
Text 3 – Poem
Why does Dank prefer ‘that gravel and dust comfort, away from that other place’?
Dank prefers the “gravel and dust” of “[her] place” over the jarring experience of sinking her toes into the unfamiliar “grains of sand” on the beach. In fact, Dank rejects the “strangeness of an unfamiliar terrain” which heightens her feelings of not belonging to this Saltwater Country. By contrasting this “gravel and dust” against the sand, “shells and seaweed”, Dank highlights the “discordant” experience of being a Gudanji woman standing on Country that’s not her own. Dank’s initial mix of tactile and aural imagery of “rubbing…those grains of sand” which “made dry, almost humming noises” creates a confusing sense of synaesthesia. This synaesthetic, and thus “grinding” experience causes her to prefer the “gravel and dust” of her own Country, and furthermore, to “tread wisely” on “that other place”.
Text 4 – Memoir extract
Analyse Langbroek’s representation of the emotional impact of new places.
Langbroek’s memoir on travelling to Italy represents the pleasantly surprising impact of experiencing a new place that exceeds your expectations. Throughout the extract, Langbroek’s extended metaphor of an Italian summer compares the emotional impact of a new place to the feeling of meeting a new romantic interest, full of anticipation and “magical…possibility’. Here, her simile of “falling in love with a country” being “like falling in love with a person” instils in Langbroek the start of memories that are bathed in “golden light”. These memories have the deep emotional impact of already feeling nostalgic while still being experienced, where Langbroek’s series of cumulative listing (from “afternoon slumbers and wine” to “summer fruits…and romance”) emphasise just how pleasantly surprising experiencing Italy as a ‘new’ place is.
Text 5 – Feature article extract
How does Hamblin expand the reader’s understanding of the paradoxes of consumerism?
In Buy Experiences, Not Things, writer James Hamblin highlights the paradoxes of consumerism by highlighting that we can buy happiness. However, this happiness can only be uncovered in “experiential” rather than “tangible” purchases that sit “right there in front of you”. In critiquing our tendency to buy things we simply do not need, Hamblin constructs logos to encourage the reader to invest in immaterial and “experiential purchases” instead of physical items that “deteriorate”. Hamblin employs quotes synthesised from psychological journal articles and gives weight to his argument by quoting a “Cornell doctoral candidate” to prove that spending our money on “trips, concerts, movies, et cetera” induces more happiness than “phones, clothes, couches, et cetera”. Here, the repetitive structure of Hamblin’s listing contrasts the enduring happiness of experiences against the paradoxically fleeting nature of tangible items. His psychological jargon of “hedonic adaptation” expands Hamblin’s use of logos to rhetorically justify this consumerist paradox, ultimately convincing the reader to invest in experiences, not things.
Written by Matrix English Team
The Matrix English Team are tutors and teachers with a passion for English and a dedication to seeing Matrix Students achieving their academic goals.
© Matrix Education and www.matrix.edu.au, 2023. Unauthorised use and/or duplication of this material without express and written permission from this site’s author and/or owner is strictly prohibited. Excerpts and links may be used, provided that full and clear credit is given to Matrix Education and www.matrix.edu.au with appropriate and specific direction to the original content.
