IB Diploma Programme Language A: Literature – Reading and Writing about Prose Fiction and Drama 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 – the IB holds copyright in its own papers. Use these alongside the official past papers available through your school or the IB store.

This practice set covers reading and writing about prose fiction and drama for IB Diploma Programme Language A: Literature, at SL and HL. It follows the current IB subject brief (first assessments for SL and HL 2021) and maps to the areas of exploration Time and space and Intertextuality: connecting texts.

Learn the method first with the prose and drama study guide and the revision notes. Course links: Language A: Literature hub · printable checklist.

Questions

Passage A – prose fiction (original text written for Marlbridge)

The key still stuck. Nadia had to lift the door by its handle and lean, the way her father always had, before the lock gave. Inside, the hall smelled of dust and lemon polish.

She had meant to start in the kitchen. Instead she found herself on the third stair, the one that creaked. Twenty years ago she had sat exactly here, shoes already on, listening to him argue with the man from the bank. She had not understood the words. She had understood the silence afterwards, and the way he came out and asked, too brightly, who wanted pancakes.

Well. There were no pancakes now. There were forty years of receipts in shoeboxes, and a coat on the peg that still held the shape of his shoulders. She would be practical. She would start with the coat.

She did not start with the coat.

Passage B – drama (original text written for Marlbridge)

A front room, late afternoon. Cardboard boxes, half-packed. On the mantelpiece, a clock that has stopped. TOMAS, forties, black suit, tie loosened, sits on a box. DANIEL, younger, still in his overcoat, stands by the door.

DANIEL: You’ve started, then. TOMAS: Someone had to. DANIEL: I said I’d come Saturday. TOMAS: You said that in March. (Pause. DANIEL picks up the clock and turns it over.) DANIEL: This was Grandad’s. TOMAS: It doesn’t go. DANIEL: It went when he – TOMAS: It doesn’t go, Dan. (He holds out his hand for it.) Box. (DANIEL does not give it to him. A long pause. Somewhere upstairs, a door bangs in the wind. Both look up.) DANIEL: (quietly) I’ll take it. TOMAS: (beat) Course you will.

Passage C – drama, pre-1929

William Shakespeare, Macbeth (first performed c. 1606; published 1623), Act 2, Scene 1. Macbeth is alone on stage.

Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee: I have thee not, and yet I see thee still. Art thou not, fatal vision, sensible To feeling as to sight? or art thou but A dagger of the mind, a false creation, Proceeding from the heat-oppressed brain?

1. Passage A. Identify the narrative perspective and give a short quotation showing whose eyes we see through. [2]

2. Passage A. Explain how the paragraph beginning “Well.” uses free indirect style to reveal Nadia’s state of mind. [3]

3. Passage A. The second paragraph moves back twenty years. Name this technique and explain its effect on how the reader understands the present scene. [3]

4. Passage A. Explain the effect of the final one-sentence paragraph. [3]

5. Passage B. Explain how the opening stage directions establish the relationship between the brothers before either speaks. [3]

6. Passage B.

(a) Identify one example of an unfinished line and state what it leaves unsaid. [2] (b) Explain how the stopped clock works as a prop in the scene. [3]

7. Passage B. Explain the effect of the off-stage sound and the final exchange (“I’ll take it.” / “Course you will.”). [3]

8. Passage C. Explain how Shakespeare uses the soliloquy convention and the language of the speech to present Macbeth’s state of mind. [4]

9. Extended task (Paper 1-style practice). Plan a guided analysis of Passage B in response to this guiding question: How does the playwright use staging and dialogue to show what the brothers cannot say to each other? Give a thesis and a paragraph plan with evidence. [8]

10. Extended task (comparative practice). Plan a comparison of Passages A and B in response to this question: How do the two texts use objects left behind to present grief? Give a thesis, a paragraph plan that compares throughout, and one model comparative paragraph. [10] (Paper 2 is an essay on two literary works; this practises the structure.)

Answers

1. Third-person limited narration [1], focalised through Nadia, for example “She had meant to start in the kitchen”, which gives her intentions from the inside. [1] Examiner insight: Name the focaliser; “third person” alone does not show whose view shapes the passage.

2. “Well.” is a one-word sentence in Nadia’s own voice, a verbal shrug, with no “she thought”. [1] “She would be practical.” gives her self-instruction in short, firm sentences, as if talking herself into control. [1] The blend of voices shows grief held down by effort, preparing for her failure in the next line. [1] Examiner insight: Strong answers show why the thought is unmarked; weak ones only define it.

3. Analepsis (flashback). [1] The memory of the argument with “the man from the bank” and the father asking “too brightly” about pancakes shows a man hiding trouble from his child. [1] The past reframes the present: the adult now understands what the child only felt. [1] Examiner insight: Credit comes from linking the flashback to the present, not retelling it.

4. It flatly contradicts the previous sentence (“She would start with the coat.”), repeating its words with “did not”. [1] Set alone, it creates a pause on the page that mirrors her pause in the hall. [1] The quiet reversal shows that grief defeats practical plans, without the narrator ever naming the feeling. [1] Examiner insight: Comment on layout and repetition together; white space is part of the effect.

5. Tomas is seated on a box in a “black suit, tie loosened”, which suggests he has come from the funeral and gone straight to work. [1] Daniel is “still in his overcoat” and “by the door”, ready to leave and not yet part of the task. [1] The stage picture sets up the conflict before a word is spoken. [1] Examiner insight: Strong answers read position and costume as choices an audience sees.

6. (a) “It went when he –” [1] leaves unsaid “when he was alive” or “when he died”, the death neither brother can name. [1] (b) A stopped clock suggests time halted by the death. [1] Tomas repeats “It doesn’t go” and wants it boxed, treating it as a fact to be packed. [1] Daniel holds on to it, treating it as memory, so the one prop carries their two ways of grieving. [1] Examiner insight: For a prop, show how characters handle it differently.

7. The door banging upstairs makes both men look up, as if the absent person were still in the house. [1] Daniel then speaks “quietly”: the sound softens him and he claims the clock. [1] Tomas’s “(beat) Course you will.” is subtext: agreement on the surface, resentment underneath that Daniel takes the keepsake without the work. [1] Examiner insight: Stage directions such as “beat” and “quietly” shape delivery; quote them as evidence.

8. The soliloquy gives the audience alone access to Macbeth’s mind just before the murder. [1] The rhetorical questions (“Is this a dagger…?”, “art thou but / A dagger of the mind”) show him unable to trust his own senses. [1] He addresses the dagger directly (“Come, let me clutch thee”), and the contrast “I have thee not, and yet I see thee still” shows sight and touch at odds. [1] The phrase “heat-oppressed brain” names his own disturbed state, so the audience watches a mind divided between the act and its horror. [1] Examiner insight: Explain the convention’s effect on the audience, not only the imagery.

9. The real Paper 1 is marked holistically against the IB criteria, not point by point; these are indicative points.

Thesis: the brothers never mention their loss directly; the playwright places it in what they do with objects, in pauses and in a sound from an empty room. [1]

• P1: the opening stage picture sets Tomas (seated, working) against Daniel (coat on, by the door). [1]
• P2: clipped lines (“I said I’d come Saturday.” / “You said that in March.”) turn small talk into accusation. [1]
• P3: the unfinished line “It went when he –” and Tomas’s cut-in show a death neither can name. [1]
• P4: the clock, handled differently by each brother, shows two ways of grieving. [1]
• P5: the pauses and the refusal to hand over the clock let silence carry the conflict. [1]
• P6: the off-stage door bang draws both men’s eyes upwards, the absent person made audible. [1]
• Ending: “Course you will.” leaves the conflict open; the audience hears what Tomas does not say. [1]

Examiner insight: Strong plans are organised by argument; weak plans go line by line into summary.

10. The real exam is marked holistically against the IB criteria; these are indicative points.

Thesis: both texts present grief through objects the dead leave behind, but the prose enters one mind through narration, while the play shows grief outwardly, through props, silence and conflict. [1]

• P1 (method): Passage A uses free indirect style to show Nadia’s inner struggle; Passage B has no narrator, so grief appears in how the brothers handle the clock. [1]
• P2 (objects): the coat that “still held the shape of his shoulders” and the stopped clock both keep the dead present; one is described to a reader, the other held on stage. [1]
• P3 (time): Passage A reaches back twenty years through analepsis; Passage B gives the past only through dialogue (“You said that in March”, “This was Grandad’s”). [1]
• P4 (silence): the white space before “She did not start with the coat.” and the long pause in Passage B both let absence speak. [1]
• P5 (difference): Nadia grieves alone; the brothers grieve against each other, so the play adds conflict, and form decides whether grief is shown inwardly or outwardly. [1]

Model comparative paragraph:

Both writers make an object stand in for the dead, but the forms handle it differently. Nadia’s father survives in a coat that “still held the shape of his shoulders” [1], an image the narrator can linger over, because prose can pause on a detail. [1] Passage B cannot describe the clock at that length; the audience watches Daniel turn it over and refuse to hand it back, so its meaning comes from action. [1] Where Nadia’s object stops her acting, the brothers’ object starts an argument, so the play makes grief a conflict between people rather than a private paralysis. [1]

Examiner insight: Strong comparisons link the texts in every paragraph; two separate blocks, one per text, read as two single-text essays placed side by side.

Where marks are usually lost

• Naming a technique (analepsis, soliloquy) without explaining its effect here.
• Ignoring stage directions in Passage B or quoting them without saying what the audience sees.
• Retelling the flashback in Passage A instead of linking it to the present scene.
• Dropping long quotations in without comment rather than embedding a few precise words.
• Writing “this creates tension” without naming what creates it.
• In the comparison, describing each passage separately with no linking sentence.

Next steps

• Prose and drama revision notes
• Prose and drama study guide
• Intertextuality practice and readers, writers and texts practice
• Language A: Literature course hub
• Printable checklist
• All free 10-minute diagnostics
• Book a free trial class

Official syllabus

International Baccalaureate Organization, Diploma Programme Subject Brief, Language A: literature, first assessments for SL and HL 2021 (2019).