Unit 3 Poetry and Prose (YET01): Practice Questions

These are original questions written for Marlbridge, for revision and practice on this content. They are not reproduced past-paper questions, and they do not replicate the exam’s exact structure, question count or mark tariffs — examination boards hold copyright in their own papers. Use these alongside the official past papers available free from your board.

Related: Unit 3 Poetry and Prose revision notes · Unit 3 study guide

Unit 3 of Pearson Edexcel International A Level English Literature (YET01) has two sections: a compulsory 20-mark essay on an unseen post-1900 poem (AO1, AO2) and a 30-mark comparative essay on two prose texts from one theme (AO1–AO4). The poem below is an original poem written for this resource, in the manner of a modern free-verse lyric. Section B gives one comparative question per theme, each with indicative content.

Section A: Poetry (20 marks)

1. Read the poem below. Explore the poet’s presentation of memory and change in this poem. In your answer you should consider the poet’s use of language, form and structure. [20]

Clearance

They took the orchard down in March, the month my father would have pruned it. Men in bright jackets, a yellow machine patient as a cow at the gate.

By noon the ground was opened, roots lifted like the hands of the drowned asking for nothing. I stood where the swing had been, and the air was the wrong shape.

They will build forty houses here. Children will grow up in kitchens standing where the old pear leaned, and never know they are inside a tree.

I keep one branch. It does not flower. I keep it anyway, the way you keep a voice on an answering machine long after the number has changed.

Section B: Prose (30 marks)

Answer one question, on your chosen theme. In your answer you must compare your two texts and consider relevant contextual factors.

2. Theme 1: Growing Up. Compare the ways in which the writers of your two chosen texts present the influence of adults on a child’s understanding of the world. [30]

3. Theme 2: Colonisation and After. Compare the ways in which the writers of your two chosen texts present the experience of being an outsider. [30]

4. Theme 3: Science and Society. Compare the ways in which the writers of your two chosen texts present the human cost of scientific or social control. [30]

5. Theme 4: Women and Society. Compare the ways in which the writers of your two chosen texts present the effects of the past on women’s lives. [30]

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Indicative content

The points below are a guide to the range of relevant material, not a checklist. Credit any well-supported response that answers the question.

Question 1 (“Clearance”)

AO1: informed personal response, terminology, expression

• The speaker watches an orchard, linked to a dead father, being cleared for housing; memory survives only in the speaker and in one kept branch.
• A personal reading might see the poem as elegy for both father and place, or as a calm acceptance that change erases private meaning.
• Accurate terminology: free verse, quatrains, enjambment, simile, metaphor, volta, elegy.

AO2: how meanings are shaped

• Form: four unrhymed quatrains give a controlled, almost reportorial shape to grief; free verse keeps the tone conversational.
• Opening: the plain statement “They took the orchard down in March” is immediately undercut by the second line, which brings the absent father into the poem.
• Imagery: the machine “patient as a cow at the gate” makes destruction seem gentle, even pastoral; the roots “like the hands of the drowned / asking for nothing” give the trees a passive, human grief.
• Absence made physical: “the air was the wrong shape” turns a missing tree and swing into a distortion of space itself.
• Structure and time: stanza 3 moves into the future tense; the image “inside a tree” folds the past into the new houses without their inhabitants knowing.
• Ending: the final simile of the answering-machine voice moves memory into modern technology, and the repeated “I keep” suggests attachment that the speaker knows is irrational.

What separates stronger answers. Weaker answers paraphrase stanza by stanza. Stronger answers trace a shift (from observation to private memory to the future to an act of keeping) and explain how the calm tone makes the loss more painful. Remember that context and comparison earn nothing in Section A.

Model paragraph. “The poem’s grief is muted by its form. Four unrhymed quatrains and a level, observational voice report the clearance as if it were routine, and the similes soften the violence: the machine is ‘patient as a cow’. The one line that breaks this calm is ‘the air was the wrong shape’, where the speaker can describe the loss only as a fault in space itself. The poem’s restraint makes this single disturbance feel larger than any open lament.”

Question 2 (Growing Up)

AO	Indicative content
AO1/AO2	First-person retrospective narration in Great Expectations (the older Pip judging the younger); the epistolary form of The Color Purple, with Celie’s letters developing in voice; the restricted third-person focus of What Maisie Knew, where the reader understands more than Maisie
AO4	Adults as abusers, teachers or bad examples: Mrs Joe, Miss Havisham and Joe for Pip; Pa and Mr ___, then Shug for Celie; Maisie’s self-absorbed parents
AO3	Victorian ideas of class and the gentleman; the American South in the early twentieth century and its racial and gender oppression; late-Victorian divorce and the custody of children; reception by modern readers

Question 3 (Colonisation and After)

AO	Indicative content
AO1/AO2	Marlow’s frame narrative in Heart of Darkness; Selvon’s creolised narrative voice and episodic structure in The Lonely Londoners; Forster’s omniscient narrator and the Marabar Caves as the novel’s central mystery
AO4	Outsiders in different directions: Europeans in Africa or India, Caribbean migrants in London; isolation versus community
AO3	Late-nineteenth-century imperialism in the Congo; British rule in India and the 1920s independence movement; post-war Caribbean migration to Britain; postcolonial readings, including Achebe’s critique of Conrad as an example of reception

Question 4 (Science and Society)

AO	Indicative content
AO1/AO2	Shelley’s nested narrators (Walton, Victor, the creature); Atwood’s Offred narrating in fragments, with the “Historical Notes” epilogue; Ishiguro’s retrospective, understated Kathy H.
AO4	Control by a single creator versus by a state or system; the body as resource; resistance and acceptance
AO3	Early-nineteenth-century scientific experiment and Romantic anxieties; the 1980s context of Atwood’s dystopia; late-twentieth-century debates on cloning and organ donation

Question 5 (Women and Society)

AO	Indicative content
AO1/AO2	Morrison’s fragmented chronology and “rememory”; Woolf’s stream of consciousness compressed into a single June day in 1923; Brontë’s framed narrative through Lockwood and Nelly Dean
AO4	The past as haunting (literal and psychological); choices made in youth (Clarissa’s marriage, Catherine’s marriage to Edgar); inheritance and property
AO3	Slavery and its aftermath in America; post-First World War London and women’s changing roles; early-nineteenth-century inheritance law and women’s dependence on marriage

What separates stronger Section B answers. Integrated comparison in every paragraph, context used to explain a writer’s choice, and analysis of narrative method rather than plot. A top response sustains a single comparative argument across the essay.

Frequently asked questions

How long should I spend on the unseen poem? It is worth 20 of 50 marks, so about 45–50 minutes is proportionate, including reading and planning time.

Can I compare the unseen poem with poems from Unit 1? No. Section A rewards AO1 and AO2 on the printed poem only; comparison is assessed in Section B.

Should my Section B essay give equal space to both texts? Broadly, yes. AO4 is about exploring connections, so a lopsided essay limits how far you can compare.

Official specification

Pearson Edexcel International Advanced Subsidiary/Advanced Level in English Literature, Issue 7, Unit 3 — qualifications.pearson.com.