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PRACTICE BOOKLET FOR GRADE 8 IGCSE

1. NARRATIVE WRITING

The essay “The Sloth”, is about grief. Choose one emotion from the mood wheel below. Write an emotive story involving
a friend from afar as a key person.

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2. DESCRIPTIVE WRITING

You are on your way to an important meeting/interview, suddenly on the road you see a huge traffic jam. Describe what
you see and how you feel in that moment.
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3. Read the passage below and then answer the questions that follow:
The Sloth
By Jill Christman

There is a nothingness of temperature, a point on the body’s mercury where our blood feels neither hot nor cold.
I remember a morning swim on the black sand eastern coast of Costa Rica four months after my twenty-two-year-old
fiancé was killed in a car accident. Walking into the water, disembodied by grief, I felt no barriers between my skin, the
air, and the water.

Later, standing under a trickle of water in the wooden outdoor shower, I heard a rustle, almost soundless, and
looking up, expecting something small, I saw my first three-toed sloth. Mottled and filthy, he hung by his meat-hook claws
not five feet above my head in the cecropia tree. He peered down at me, his flattened head turned backwards on his neck.
Here is a fact: a sloth cannot regulate the temperature of his blood. He must live near the equator.

I thought I knew slow, but this guy, this guy was slow. The sound I heard was his wiry-haired blond elbow, brushed
green with living algae, stirring a leaf as he reached for the next branch. Pressing my wet palms onto the rough wooden
walls, I watched the sloth move in the shadows of the canopy. Still reaching. And then still reaching.

What else is this slow? Those famous creatures of slow—the snail, the tortoise—they move faster. Much. This slow
seemed impossible, not real, like a trick of my sad head. Dripping and naked in the jungle, I thought, That sloth is as slow
as grief. We were numb to the speed of the world. We were one temperature.

1. Why is the author of the story sad? [1]


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2. What are the two strong adjectives the author uses to describe the sloth? [2]
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3. Find an example of sensory imagery using TOUCH in the essay and write the quote and its effect below. [2]
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4. Find and example of sensory imagery using SOUND in the essay and write the quote and its effect below. [2]
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5. Give the meaning of each of these words as used in the essay. In each case, give one word or short phrase. [2]
a. Disembodied
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b. Wiry
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6. Why has the author used sentence fragments in the essay? To what effect? [2]
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7. Identify the simile that is also the main theme of the essay. [2]
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COMMONLY CONFUSED WORDS

Circle the correct word in each sentence. Options are underlined.

1. Oliver Wood tried to be as quiet/quite as possible because he knew the toddlers were asleep in the next room.
2. Moaning Myrtle didn’t buy the write/right tools to build a time machine.
3. Gilderoy Lockhart knew there were adventures to be had in the vast dessert/desert but he thought it would be
safer to take his vacation at the lake instead.
4. Last Sunday, Lord Voldemort went up to the altar/alter to ask for donations for the annual food drive.
5. Whenever the principle/principal makes an announcement, Mustafa hopes she will let everyone go home early.

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